A compelling, melancholy novel that explores the beautiful rise and often violent breakdown of dreams, ideals, and love.
Mestre-Reed combines elements of a spy novel and political thriller with bleak, steely-eyed realism about Cuba in the 1990s.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of Soviet support, Cuba entered the “special period,” which was marked by a sharp increase in poverty, a lack of basic goods and services, and deep uncertainty about the future of the country and the socialist dreams it was built on. Mestre-Reed explores this uncertain time while also telling a story about Cuba’s underground gay and HIV-positive population. Rafa, who's come to Havana from rural eastern Cuba, goes home one night with a man named Nicolás, becoming entwined with him, his brother, Renato, and their mother, Cecilia. The family runs a high-dollar but semilegal restaurant, or paladar, out of their home, catering to rich tourists who seek an “authentic” Cuban meal, and Rafa helps them wait tables. Soon, he falls into a passionate and tormented affair with Nicolás that’s intimate and yet hard to define for both parties. During the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Cuba established sidatorios, or sanitariums, which were mandatory for people who were HIV-positive. The novel opens after Nicolás has been sent to a sidatorio and died, though no one knows where his body is. Renato also tests positive for HIV and is sent to the sidatorio but is allowed to leave on the weekends. Rafa and Renato are united in their grief for Nicolás but also in their aimlessness; they spend their weekends together, wandering the city, looking for tourists to pick up, and roaming without much of a purpose. After a fateful encounter with an enigmatic German tourist, Rafa learns that Nicolás and Renato had more secrets than he realized. Nicolás was a member of “los injected ones,” people so disillusioned with their country and their future that they purposefully infected themselves with HIV in a self-destructive act of protest. Now, this group is determined to overthrow the Castro government during Pope John Paul II’s upcoming visit to Cuba. Rafa becomes a hesitant detective, more interested in learning about Nicolás, Renato, and himself than in stopping the violent uprising. In this way, the book itself reflects the slow decay of ideals Mestre-Reed is exploring in the story. The novel’s Cuba is full of dreaming, even delusional, idealists—whether it’s the bureaucrats running the state, foreign tourists determined to overlook what’s in front of them to see the picturesque Cuba of the mind, or erstwhile revolutionaries committed to any kind of change at any price.
A compelling, melancholy novel that explores the beautiful rise and often violent breakdown of dreams, ideals, and love.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-641-29364-8
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
