The novel's slower moments are like a pomegranate's dull skin before it breaks to reveal a cache of jewels.
Lee’s third novel returns to the terrain of The Serpent’s Gift (1994) as it follows a Black woman working to reunite with her children in the wake of addiction and incarceration.
After a four-year sentence, Ranita Atwater exits the Oak Hills correctional facility into a freedom that is shackled to her past. As Ranita seeks to shore up her sobriety and defend her parental status, she bumps up against memories from her former lives—her childhood as a girl with a loving Daddy and a Mama who found her wanting; her tumultuous relationship with Jasper, the father of her children, who introduced her to opiates; her descent into heroin addiction with David Quarles; and the blossoming joy of her love for Maxine, a fellow inmate. The novel alternates among these timelines, following the logic of Ranita’s memory. Each chapter-length flashback trades the first-person narration of the present-day sections for a third-person perspective. But as she opens up to state-mandated therapist Drew Turner, Ranita reveals the traumas at the core of her struggles with addiction. Throughout, Ranita speaks of racism and systemic injustice with awesome clarity. “In prison,” she tells Turner, “...you’re just breathing flesh that can house contraband, and cause violence, and run.” Also: “Being a commodity. Being bred….All of that’s echoing, day in and day out.” Diction is a central theme, as Ranita, a lover of words and facts, considers how men have used a nickname—Cherry—to define her according to their perception. The novel bristles with strong women, from aunties Jessie and Val to the inmates and sponsor who inspire Ranita to have faith in herself. Because it eschews plot twists for emotional reflection, the novel drags at times; but Lee’s handling of trauma is deft, and her portrayal of the carceral system’s cruelty is unflinching and empathetic.
The novel's slower moments are like a pomegranate's dull skin before it breaks to reveal a cache of jewels.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781982171896
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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