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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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