An earnest attempt at combining fiction and philosophy that doesn’t meet its goal.
A new husband confronts his personal failings after meeting an unhoused philosopher.
In 2019 Chicago, following five years of dating, Joe and Audrey Palmer are newly married and expecting a baby. However, after Audrey has a miscarriage, things become fraught between the couple. Joe pushes himself too hard at work at his sales job, sometimes taking drugs, including cocaine, for motivation. Meanwhile, Audrey, an elementary school teacher, spends time at home feeling like she’s been left to shoulder their grief alone. After spending a misguided night at a strip club, Joe becomes friends with Frank, a man without a home who shares interesting books and ideas with anyone who will listen. Frank’s ideology hinges on a strong belief in God and a mission to make certain that there are at least “ten good souls” in the city; if he succeeds at the latter, he believes that he will have done his duty to the best of his ability: “That’s the heart and soul of my work on these streets,” he says. Later, Joe learns that Audrey is pregnant again, and his past actions come back to haunt their relationship. In a foreword, Martin effectively notes what he sees as a lack of books that are both meaningful and engaging, and he ambitiously hopes to find that balance in this story. However, although the prose is satisfactory, it tends to explicitly state the lessons Joe learns over the course of the narrative. As a result, it feels less like a study of what these characters owe to themselves and one another and more a didactic account of what readers are meant to glean from the characters’ growth. Smaller stories are interspersed throughout—including an allegory about two brothers named Strength and Ambition—that are apparently meant to tie in with Martin’s larger narrative. However, these passages, and seemingly random asides on such societal ills as addiction, ultimately muddle the plot instead of adding depth or clarity.
An earnest attempt at combining fiction and philosophy that doesn’t meet its goal.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781662477379
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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