A remarkable collection marred only by occasional heavy-handedness.
A collection of stories about nuclear power and its effects.
Japanese author Kobayashi’s second book to appear in English explores ground previously traversed in the novel Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (2022). This is not a complaint: Kobayashi, who is also known as a visual artist, doesn’t cannibalize her own work. Her interest in atomic energy and its insidiously long-reaching effects on Japanese society tends to be deep and wide-ranging rather than repetitive. Kobayashi’s stories emphasize the experiences of women and frequently veer into the speculative realm. In “Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey,” a woman goes into labor in the summer of 1945. But is she giving birth to a baby or to a bomb of her own? As often as Kobayashi roots her work in historical and scientific research (“The sun is 1,400,000 kilometers in diameter,” she informs us in “Sunrise”), she also does so in rich and evocative metaphors. In “Shedding,” which Kobayashi apparently wrote at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown in Japan, a mysterious illness is spreading: The infected lose the ability to speak or to process language at all and are eventually encouraged to kill themselves. Even those who avoid suicide “lost their words completely,” Kobayashi writes. “These poor souls were called empty shells. An empty shell—as a person loses words one by one, soon their most distinguishing feature becomes their lack. Their lack of words. Tantamount to a lack of life, of existence.” But as this passage also makes clear, Kobayashi has the unfortunate habit, every once in a while, of hitting her mark a little too squarely on the nose. It’s OK, you want to assure her; we get it; no need to spell it all out.
A remarkable collection marred only by occasional heavy-handedness.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781662601170
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Hovers awkwardly between YA fantasy/romance and magical realism for grown-ups.
Debut adult novel from the bestselling author of The Last Legacy (2021) and Namesake (2021).
August Salt was 18 when he was accused of murdering his friend Lily Morgan. No longer welcome on Saoirse, the tiny Pacific Northwest island where they lived, he and his mother moved to the mainland, changed their last name, and started a new life. Fourteen years later, his mother’s insistence that her ashes be buried on her ancestral home sends him back to a place he didn’t expect to see again. For most of Saoirse’s residents, his return is unwelcome. For Emery Blackwood, it stirs up feelings she’s spent her whole adult life trying to suppress. An isolated community, an unsolved mystery, long-buried secrets coming to light: This is a classic setup for psychological suspense or gothic horror, and this story offers a bit of both. But it also offers a little something extra: The women of Saoirse are witches. Young has written several young adult novels full of invention, adventure, and sorcery. By the end of this novel, though, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she decided writing for grown-ups means combining a dour, lifeless tone with a plot that barely moves. And there’s something almost perverse about a narrative with a witch protagonist being so miserly with magic. The central tensions driving the story are pretty simple. Neither Emery nor August has ever recovered from the abrupt end of their youthful romance. Lily’s murderer has never been found. The people of Saoirse are worried that August will try to reclaim the orchard that his grandfather left to the community. Saoirse is a place unlike any other. The most compelling of these—the mystery surrounding Lily’s death, the unique nature of the island—get the least attention. August and Emery only decide to investigate their friend’s murder late in the novel. And, despite every first-person narrator here assuring us that Saoirse is a singular place with its own rules, the island comes across like any other small, insular place that depends on a seasonal tourism industry—sporadic acts of witchcraft notwithstanding.
Hovers awkwardly between YA fantasy/romance and magical realism for grown-ups.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35851-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
In 10 eerie stories, Valencia leans into the horror and grit under a shiny world.
Women get lost in deserts and caves and find strange creatures waiting—including their new selves.
Wellness retreats, guerrilla marketing campaigns, literary blogs, remote Airbnbs in Joshua Tree: Where there is glamour, there is terror in this self-assured debut collection. Although all Valencia’s stories are engaging, those that follow gangs of easily influenced women are the highlights of this set, such as "Mystery Lights," about a marketing campaign in Marfa hijacked by an angry bewigged influencer and her followers, or the Black Mirror-esque “The Reclamation,” about a desert wellness retreat with a cultlike leader. The gendered nature of the horror genre comes through in these stories’ looming threats of sexual violence, such as in the opener, “Dogs,” in which a woman’s escape from a pack of dogs lands her in a strange man’s locked SUV; “You Can Never Be Too Sure,” in which a myth about a predator prowling around a college campus collides with the truth; or “Bright Lights, Big Deal,” about working in the literary world pre-#MeToo. Girls disappear; some reemerge acting more animal. Some are lost forever to the forest. Aliens and ghosts hover close or fall away. In “Clean Hunters,” a ghost-hunting couple’s honeymoon is called into question when the wife can’t feel spirits anymore. In “The White Place,” a mysterious white orb hovers over a famous painter, her cook’s pregnant daughter, and the man they both are involved with. Valencia investigates the threats lurking behind our wellness brands and cave tours, viral literary aspirations and ski bum college friend groups. Self-actualization, she says, is sometimes not a desert meditation retreat—it may be a cave-dwelling flesh-eating creature. These stories show us there’s not all that much in the way between them.
In 10 eerie stories, Valencia leans into the horror and grit under a shiny world.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781959030621
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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