A luminous collection of stories found in the thin margins between loss, failure, and redemption.
Troubled doctors and office drones look for meaning by methods both mundane and magical in Grinnell’s short stories.
The Bostonian characters in this collection are mostly doctors who feel guilty about their inability to save patients and white-collar workers numbed by purposeless routines yearning for more authentic existences. They include a neurosurgeon, grief-stricken by her sister’s death, who drinks a psychedelic ayahuasca potion and gains the ability to resurrect the dead; a buttoned-down website manager who resolves to help a frustrated aquarium orca escape to the sea; a Harvard researcher in Kenya who is confronted by a woman who implores him to cure her daughter’s terminal case of malaria; a film student who makes a documentary on the thwarted lives of a hospital’s marketing team; a would-be writer who grows disillusioned with self-improvement nostrums before inventing his own; and a psychiatrist who struggles to save a depressed woman who vows to commit suicide on her 25th birthday if she doesn’t cheer up. The author makes absorbing digressions into everything from motorcycle maintenance to firefly bioluminescence, and poses quiet but passionate philosophical challenges to his characters in their quests for self-actualization. Grinnell writes vividly in many registers, from spooky action (“Allie exhaled. ‘Breathe.’ Suddenly the patient twitched. Then his back contorted, and he inhaled a massive gulp of air”) to shrewd, anthropological dissections of toxic office politics (“it seemed common practice for employees to weaponize HR against one another”). He illuminates plangent feelings of sickness and sorrow, as in the title story, in which a husband neglects his wife in a futile effort to find a cure for her illness (“An embrace wouldn’t have taken away her cancer, but at least she wouldn’t have felt so alone and cold during those long, dark winter nights”). The result is an entertaining set of tales that pack an emotional wallop.
A luminous collection of stories found in the thin margins between loss, failure, and redemption.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2023
ISBN: 979-8-88838-375-9
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A unique concept that promises readers will find at least one, if not three, entwined but different narratives to enjoy.
When Vis is copied into two other realities, he must stop a god from repeatedly culling almost everyone back home.
Thousands of years ago, to prevent the Concurrence from enslaving everyone, the world was split into three near-identical copies: Res, Obiteum, and Luceum. To exist in all three worlds, to wield Will there, is to achieve synchronism. After the events in The Will of the Many (2023), which cost Vis his arm and the life of his friend, Vis achieves Synchronism. While Res-Vis must continue to play Hierarchy politics to find his friend’s killer, Obiteum-Vis finds a ruined world, where the dead are reanimated and used by Ka, the Concurrence, and the only other person to exist in synchronism. Meanwhile, Luceum-Vis is forced into a dispute between druids, their High Council, and their kings—with one king intent on killing him—and Vis has no idea why. On all worlds, Vis is as shrewd as ever, weighing his options, planning ahead, and doing what he must to survive. However, he, too, slowly diverges, doing things he swore he never would: cede his Will, use Will to control someone else, and reveal his true name. If at least one Vis cannot use his synchronism and power of Will to kill the Concurrence, no Vis will be safe, and another Cataclysm will cull those he loves on Res. Book Two of the Hierarchy series is a speculative fantasy that is at once Egyptian post-apocalyptic, Celtic medieval, and Roman dystopian, thanks to the multidimensional setting. Although the sprawling narrative at times overextends itself, Islington rewards patient readers with a compelling story, a cast of complex and diverse characters, and a glimpse into how far a good man can go before he’s lost. A symbol at the start of each chapter delineates which world and Vis it’s about. Readers should read The Will of the Many before attempting this volume, or they may be confused for the first several chapters and beyond.
A unique concept that promises readers will find at least one, if not three, entwined but different narratives to enjoy.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781982141233
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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