A formerly enslaved mother’s search for her lost children is emotionally diluted by lack of craft.
A historical novel set in the Caribbean in the 1830s.
One of the enduring horrors of slavery was its destruction of families by enslavers who literally tore children from their mothers and sold them away, never to be heard from again. That violation has happened not once but five times to Rachel, the book’s protagonist. Born enslaved on a sugar cane plantation in Barbados, she’s in the act of escaping as the book begins in 1834, running for her life with no clear goal but freedom. When she meets a formerly enslaved woman called Mama B, the older woman tells Rachel, “Me see it in your face. Your pickney. You want to find them.” From that moment, finding her lost children becomes Rachel’s quest. One of the women in Mama B’s community remembers seeing a girl who resembled Rachel in Bridgetown several years before—just the first of many handy coincidences that form much of the plot. Sure enough, Rachel finds Mary Grace working in a dress shop when she steps in to get out of the rain—and the shop owner gives her a job, too, and turns out to have a friend who has access to slave sale records that might lead to the whereabouts of two of Rachel’s sons in Guyana. It seems almost everyone she meets has some information or skill to contribute to her search—so much so it starts to strain credulity. There’s also a streak of anachronism that weakens the book’s sense of history. A formerly enslaved woman–turned–sex worker named Hope explains to Rachel why she does that kind of work: “I make money and that means I don’t have to give myself up completely.” It’s a 21st-century feminist attitude that seems unlikely for a 19th-century woman, as do some of Rachel’s meditations on the destruction of the environment wrought by plantation farming. The novel’s flaws of plot, character, and verisimilitude are frequent enough that it doesn’t achieve the inspirational power it seems to aim for.
A formerly enslaved mother’s search for her lost children is emotionally diluted by lack of craft.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-54804-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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