An unusual take on the power of memory.
A Puerto Rican woman displaced from her home and her own past builds a surprising life.
Teenage Luz Peña Fuentes is happy growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1975. Her doting parents, Salvadora and Federico, are multilingual research scientists who provide their only child with a warm home and complete support for the lessons she hopes will lead to a career as a ballerina. Their love helps counter the bullying she sometimes suffers as “the tallest girl and the only Black one” in the ballet school. But a car crash destroys Luz’s world, killing her parents and leaving her with serious physical and mental disabilities. She has no memory of her earlier life—a small mercy in that she can’t remember the accident and, for a short time, she forgets what racism is. For the rest of her life, the few memories she can hang onto will be secondhand—the memories others tell her about, not her own. The novel alternates between Luz’s girlhood and her life four decades later in the Bronx in 2017, where her grandfather took her to live after the accident. He’s gone now, but Luz has a family circle to support her. Two of them are women who have cared for her since the accident: a lesbian couple named Shirley and Ada. Luz, Shirley, and Ada call themselves las madres. The rest of the circle is las nenas: Luz’s daughter, Marysol, and Ada and Shirley’s daughter, Graciela. Luz functions well in some ways—she married and had Marysol, then lost her young husband in another tragic event. She makes a living as an artist but still has almost no memory and is dependent on the other four women in daily life. To help answer Marysol’s longing to understand more about her mother’s past and her native Puerto Rico, the five women plan a vacation there—in hurricane season—that will be full of unexpected challenges and shocking revelations. As can happen in novels with narratives split between different time periods, in this one the chapters set in the 1970s are more vivid and engaging than many of those set in the present, which can bog down in extended passages of exposition. Luz’s shattered memory serves to a degree as a metaphor for the Puerto Rican diaspora and the lasting effects of colonialism, but the book’s core is its strong female friendships.
An unusual take on the power of memory.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780307962614
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Catnip for anyone who ever wished they could walk around in their favorite book.
A young woman goes on an epic adventure while living out every book lover’s dream.
“All stories are love stories if you love stories,” and Rainy March, a 27-year-old woman living in picturesque Fort Meriwether, Oregon, certainly loves stories. Rainy’s love of literature goes beyond the surface—literally. In her job as a Book Witch, Rainy has the ability to step inside novels with the aid of her magical black umbrella and her feline familiar, Koshka. Rainy’s job, along with the other members of the Ink and Paper Coven including her grandfather, is to save stories from being destroyed by so-called Burners—conservative villains who hop into books to kill off main characters from stories they find offensive to their traditional values—or from fictional characters who accidentally wander into the real world. Rainy’s life is a little more complicated than that of your average Book Witch, however—once, on a mission, she stepped into a Duke of Chicago detective novel and fell in love with the titular Duke. Unfortunately, it’s forbidden for a Book Witch to fall in love with a fictional character lest their love end up in the novel and the canon be changed forever. But then Rainy’s grandfather goes missing on a Book Witch mission, and Rainy and the Duke must team up to track him down, along with a stolen copy of Nancy Drew’s The Secret of the Old Clock that belonged to Rainy’s late mother. Their adventures have them popping in and out of books, including, delightfully, a party scene in The Great Gatsby, and uncovering secrets that could change the course of Rainy’s life. While Shaffer’s writing is a touch too cutesy to mine real emotional depths, the charms of the heroine and the conceit itself make up for it in spades.
Catnip for anyone who ever wished they could walk around in their favorite book.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780593983584
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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