An offbeat, mordantly entertaining but discordant saga of war at its worst and its cutest.
A small-town Vietnam veteran is beset by PTSD and talking rodent soldiers in this tragicomic fantasia.
Bull River Falls, Colorado, population 875, is experiencing a summer of discontent, with raging forest fires, strangely aggressive wildlife, the Gold Gulch Corporation’s controversial expansion of its ski resort and golf course, and the mysterious gunshot death of a young woman. Surveying it all is Stan Przewalski, the 60-something editor of the Beacon-News, but he’s an unreliable observer. His psychiatric meds barely control his nightmares about Vietnam, which bleed into hallucinatory daytime flashbacks, and he’s alive only because the rope that he recently hanged himself with broke. He takes it in stride when he meets Chaz, a gopher who, thanks to exposure to radioactive testing, can outthink and outtalk most humans and magically shrink large objects—including Stan—down to his foot-long scale. Hallucination or not, Chaz deeply resonates with Stan’s past: He loves 1960s rock and has organized his fellow gophers into an army with miniaturized attack helicopters and fighter jets. Nikolich’s fanciful scenario makes up most of this meandering novel, which consists mainly of Stan wrestling with his Vietnam demons while taking in Chaz’s diminutive parody of human culture and warfare. Stan occasionally joins the gophers’ attacks on Gold Gulch, which is trying to drive them off their land. The resulting yarn is imaginative and often beguiling, like a mashup of Platoon and Gremlins scripted by William S. Burroughs. But it is also awkwardly dissonant, with the gophers’ cartoon antics—“They then synced the upstairs elevator door alarms to the hospital PA system, which had already been programmed by a team of prairie dog sound engineers to play a continuous loop of Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 Woodstock rendition of the Star Spangled Banner”—clashing tonally with Stan’s pitch-black memories of combat. (“I was covered with blood….I walked up to the first one and took his head off. I emptied half the ammo belt into that bunch.”) Many scenes clearly take place in Stan’s dreams or imagination and therefore feel inconsequential and uninvolving. Still, the author is a gifted writer, and when he looks outside Stan’s head—“The old woman and the horse faced into the wind and together they watched the smoke rise and hang in gauzy white sheets above the valley”—his prose is entrancing.
An offbeat, mordantly entertaining but discordant saga of war at its worst and its cutest.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68433-573-2
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.
A dark fantasy set on the Yale campus ends with a bang.
Galaxy “Alex” Stern of Lethe House, one of Yale’s storied secret societies, has been to hell and back. That was in Hell Bent (2023), the middle book in Bardugo’s Ninth House trilogy, where the secret societies wield not just temporal power but magic as well. Hell Bent ended with Alex and her friends rescuing her crush, mentor, and fellow Lethe officer, Daniel “Darlington” Arlington V, from eternal torment. One small wrinkle: The demon Golgarot used Alex’s blood to wedge a door open between Hell and New Haven, and his minions are slipping through. Also, one of the group has turned into a vampire, and Darlington is now half demon. “He’d given up some part of himself to preserve the rest of his human soul. He’d become both prisoner and warden.” As the final book opens, the exhausted crew are hunting yet another monster. They can’t keep this up forever; they will have to find a way to close the portal. Alex has the energetic, driven melancholy of the hard-boiled, dark fantasy heroine she is. She believes “magic is real, but safe is make-believe,” as her roommate puts it. An open hellmouth, a supportive scholar, a vampire whose story arcs precariously toward redemption, a gentleman fiend who gets literally horny when aroused, a California girl with rare supernatural powers who cracks wise as she fights fiends—the series has a lot in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spawn, but Bardugo’s way with words and her keen social observation keep the book from feeling derivative. A demon’s classic New England house is decorated with “ruthlessly inoffensive watercolor seascapes”; Lethe’s board president “wore the new uniform of Wall Street: a dress shirt, khakis, and a fleece with a Yale Y embroidered over the heart, as if he were on his way to a hostile takeover followed by some light rock climbing.” Will Alex and her friends get the door shut without losing Darlington? Bardugo injects her protagonist with such a convincing mix of cynicism and hope that failure seems like a distinct possibility.
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781250884312
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 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.
