A suspenseful but tender tale that exemplifies the power of intersectionality.
Themes of environmental justice, queer love, and Indigenous rights intersect in González’s mystery.
Mariana and Luisa Sánchez Celis grew up in a household with a mother disabled by a stroke, their uncle Alonso, and caretaker Amalia. The novel, set in 1990 and 1991, filters the events of the story through the colorism, racism, and patriarchy of their society as 22-year-old Mariana falls in love with Fernanda, an Indigenous Seri woman who’s passionate about protecting the turtles of the Sinaloa coast from extinction. After leaving Mexico to attend Juilliard, Mariana returns to find that Alonso has gone missing, and anti-poaching laws are harming local fisherman while industrial development hurts the wildlife and beaches. She, Luisa, Fernanda, and others start a business to preserve the livelihoods of locals while speaking up against powerful family friends. As the mystery of Alonso’s disappearance is resolved, a truth about Mariana is revealed. The second part of the novel focuses on Clavel Celis Coulson, Luisa and Mariana’s mother, as a high-society 16-year-old forced to marry a man twice her age; Amalia’s dark past also comes to light. The final part ties up a mystery while exploring themes of family conflict and queer relationships. González’s characters feel simultaneously archetypal and individual. On one level, they represent changing attitudes of various segments of Mexican society from the 1970s to the 2000s—enthusiastic, money-hungry land developers; an Indigenous conservationist; and an uncomfortable elite clinging to traditionalism. Yet the first-person perspectives of Mariana and Clavel showcase the specific desires, hopes, and dreams of each person as they try to find their place in a complex and dynamic social setting. González shines at exploring the effects of racist discrimination against Indigenous Mexicans without ever reducing characters to mere pawns. Her prose style is simple yet poignant and emotive, particularly when describing human desire and natural beauty: “Nothing relaxed me more than Bach combined with the aromas of the ocean and the sight of beauty. If only music could bend life to its rules.” González's closing notes provide the story’s critical real-world origins.
A suspenseful but tender tale that exemplifies the power of intersectionality.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947976-31-3
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Cynren Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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