An engrossing rock novel about a complicated antihero.
Gebien concludes her trilogy about the journey of a washed-up rock star in this novel.
Damen Warner, the frontman for the band OBNXS, is back in his final story about trying to make it as a rock star. Throughout the novel, numerous obstacles are put in Damen’s way: his grandmother’s will, a custody battle, pit bulls, viral videos, and more. He has fallen into a deep alcoholic depression: Damen “looked like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. Thirty years old. Too tall, too thin, too angry, too mean.” Damen’s relationships with his girlfriend, Melody, and her daughter, Vico, are in trouble: Melody’s ex, the “Baby Daddy,” wants custody of their daughter, and Damen ends up in the middle of the conflict. Additionally, Melody is meeting with her former clients from a strip club for extra money, which makes Damen uncomfortable. Then Damen runs into Evangeline, a girl he met on the road, a social media–savvy evangelical Christian willing to help the band with their image—for a fee. She arranges protests against OBNXS to gin up publicity, generating sufficient interest to allow the band to continue working on their album. Though Damen finds it easy to create the image that the internet demands, he drifts further away from who he is as an artist (“As much as I wanted to believe my career was rallying due to the overwhelming magnetism of my musical genius, the truth was most of my notoriety now came from videos of me doing stupid shit on the internet, including such hit singles as “Arrested Naked” (feat. TSA), “That Guy Who Kicked Over A Piano,” and “Strip Club Riot”).
The author is able to evoke raw emotions with a depth of sincerity (and a bit of embarrassment) through her cast of quirky characters. Damen has moments of tenderness with Vico balanced by his characteristic raw, raunchy humor and distinct voice. The narrative is paced well, moving quickly from one episode to the next. Gebien’s vivid descriptions transport readers into each scene and expose Damen’s naked feelings—as he struggles with the urge to drink one night, he leaves Melody in bed and goes to the kitchen, where he sees that “the abandoned chilis still lay on the cutting board like small, shriveled, scorched hearts. [He] knew how they felt.” These moments of revelation help make Damen an empathetic character. The sequences in which the band collaborates and riffs are strengths of the novel, allowing the reader to see more of Damen’s artistic process. Describing the album the band is working to complete, Damen notes that the “range of new sounds we planned to include was a lot wider than any of our previous work, slaloming wildly from hard rock and metal to dark country to absurd pop to achingly earnest to melodic impressionism.” Or, as Mungo Gordon, the band’s producer, sums it up, “chaotic,” a word that could also describe the feel of the novel—though it’s chaotic in a purposeful way, like OBNXS’ music.
An engrossing rock novel about a complicated antihero.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9798988160502
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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