A well-turned exploration of how intensely place and history shape our identities.
A gay New Yorker revisits his Florida roots to reckon with death, family, and old bigotries.
Daniel, the narrator of Rodriques’ assured debut, is finding his way as a high school teacher in New York and struggling to keep a relationship when he gets some bad news: Aubrey, a high school friend, has died in a car crash near where they grew up in North Florida. The incident calls up a host of tender memories: She was one of the few White people in his high school who seemed comfortable with him as a Black man. But the incident also surfaces a host of identity crises: Daniel’s North Florida adolescence was the crucible of his sexuality as well as his family heritage, a long line of slavery, violence, and abuse stretching back to his family’s native Jamaica. Plotwise, the novel is a coming-of-age story with something of the tenor of a mystery: Daniel returns to Florida to sort out why Aubrey was in a car with Brandon, an abusive and hard-drinking ex-boyfriend. But the novel’s tension comes from Daniel’s struggle to navigate the emotional and cultural baggage he brings on the trip. Just as Daniel code-switches depending on whether he’s talking with his Black friends, gay men, poor Whites, or Jamaican relatives, the narrative alternates among the brightness of his memories of Aubrey, dark recollections of how his mother and grandmother were treated, and his present-day confrontations with those who knew Aubrey, including Brandon, and a general feeling of being adrift and rootless. (A reference to The Odyssey is on-point.) The tail end of the book, which turns on Daniel’s emotional purging, runs at a somewhat disappointing low boil considering the visceral incidents that precede it. But Rodriques brings a lyrical touch to his hero’s inner life, making his past pains and present-day heartbreaks feel bone-deep.
A well-turned exploration of how intensely place and history shape our identities.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-54079-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer.
Whitehead’s justly celebrated Harlem Trilogy comes to a triumphant, satisfying conclusion.
The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner has brought his decades-long saga of furniture retailer and part-time criminal fence Ray Carney into the 1980s, a time of starkly mixed blessings for a New York City galvanized by reckless real estate development, plagued with widespread homelessness, and immersed in crime and corruption of gaudy proportions. As with its two predecessors, Harlem Shuffle (2021) and Crook Manifesto (2023), this installment carves its historic period into three self-contained but interwoven stories set in three different years. The first takes place in 1981, when Ray, flush with pride over being named Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” is confounded when wife Elizabeth is denied a loan for her travel business. So, to get her the money she needs, he joins a crew led by the redoubtable Uncle Rich, a legendary thief, embarking on a near-impossible heist at the Waldorf Astoria. Elizabeth also spearheads the second installment, which takes place two years later, when she recruits the dyspeptic Pepper, Ray’s friend and sometime coconspirator, as bodyguard for a jittery art dealer carrying a valuable African mask. When that object goes missing, Pepper and a hip young woman bearing a mohawk haircut and combat boots wander the seedier streets of Manhattan to locate it, crossing paths with a “Melancholy Hitman” also frantically pursuing the mask and leaving mutilated corpses in his wake. In the final section, taking place in 1986, Ray struggles to fulfill a posthumous obligation to his ill-fated cousin, Freddie, by using all his hard-earned wiles as salesman and felon to save Freddie’s son, Robert, from being framed (or worse) in the murder of a bent Queens lawyer. It’s as improbable as packing three page-turning thrillers into one book that’s sustained throughout by rich, engaging characterizations and lucid, provocative reflections on a community, a city, and a people it presents as both exasperating and captivating with equal intensity.
A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550505
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Vivid characters are set adrift in a “ripped from the headlines” tableau that complicates the story, and the storytelling.
A diverting midlife story plucks at the secrets good people carry to the grave.
As a reader, Artie Dam—the protagonist of Strout’s 11th book—encounters Olive Kitteridge, “a crotchety old woman from Maine” and Strout’s most celebrated fictional character. Artie picked up the Pulitzer-anointed book centered on Olive after his wife, Evie, loved it, “oh, years ago now.” Strout is having a bit of fun—that “oh” is a trademark—even though she marbles her latest novel with marital infidelity, political anxiety, and suicide. Indeed, it is the fact that Olive’s father died by suicide that Artie, 57 and gaining a paunch, recalls now in his own dismalness. As the story begins, he is pondering the most discreet way to die, despite having been Massachusetts’ Teacher of the Year five years earlier. Artie seems the inverse of irascible Olive: beloved by his students; by his grown son, Rob; and by the English teacher, Anne, who quietly pines for him. But like Olive, Artie has distressing impulses—he steals a comb, then some expensive shirts. Much of the text bobs along on Artie’s stocktaking memories, chunked out in short, occasionally abrupt paragraphs. Strout’s storytelling is thinning a bit, like middle-aged hair. Then, midbook, she clobbers Artie with a brutal existential shock. In its wake, Strout surfs the nature of loneliness, corrosive secrets, and the convulsions of the 2024 presidential election. Hers is an unremittingly Blue State book, although Artie has one friend who, unbeknownst to him, supported Donald Trump. On the day after the election, Artie somberly concludes that his “country was committing suicide.” This is the first novel in which Strout entirely vacates Maine for another setting. But she sticks with Artie and, on the final pages, delivers him a satisfying finale.
Vivid characters are set adrift in a “ripped from the headlines” tableau that complicates the story, and the storytelling.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9798217154746
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
