An atmospheric mystery that is never obvious.
Argentine novelist Ronsino’s debut in English, a brief, brooding novel set on the windswept edge of the pampas.
Not much happens in Chivilcoy, which, though in the province of Buenos Aires, might as well be on the moon. The story opens ominously, in 1973, when workers come without notice and dig up the town’s rail link to the outside, leaving the massive Glaxo factory an island out on the grassland. The narrator is one of four figures who, in this gloomy place, play a part in a killing whose motives are obscure, recapitulated, in a way, by a finger-shooting game in which bored kids re-enact a gunfight from a Western film. Jealousy plays its part as the Dulcinea of the piece, the lovely La Negra Miranda, provokes the requisite deadly sins while pretty much minding her own business. All these years later, and she has gone, and, as the second narrator, now speaking from a vantage point a quarter-century after the events, says, “Here, in the Don Pedrín, Lucio Montes tells me about a ghost, because to name La Negra Miranda is like naming a ghost.” She is not the only specter, not the only secret the little town seeks to hide as it tries to forget the killing of an innocent—and, at the same time, the involvement of some of its inhabitants in the murderous dictatorship of the 1970s and the punishment of some who committed no crime; jealousy is one thing, but wanton and casual violence is quite another. Allusive and reserved, as if peeking out at the scene of the crime from behind drawn curtains, Ronsino’s short novel has an almost claustrophobic feel to it; if the only way to escape the place is to be imprisoned or drafted, the only way to get out of the narrative is to see people at their indifferent worst.
An atmospheric mystery that is never obvious.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61219-567-4
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
This is historical adventure on a grand scale, right up there with the works of Conn Iggulden and Minette Walters.
Plenty of gore from days of yore fills the 12th entry in Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom series (War of the Wolf, 2018, etc.).
The pagan warlord Uhtred of Bebbanburg narrates his 10th-century adventures, during which he hacks people apart so that kingdoms might be stitched together. He is known to some as the Godless or the Wicked, a reputation he enjoys. Edward, King of Wessex, Mercia, and East Anglia is gravely ill, and Uhtred pledges an oath to likely heir Æthelstan to kill two rivals, Æthelhelm and “his rotten nephew,” Ælfweard, when the king dies. Uhtred’s wife, Eadith, wants him to break that oath, but he cannot live with the dishonor of being an oathbreaker. The tale seems to begin in the middle, as though the reader had just turned the last page in the 11th book—and yet it stands alone quite well. Uhtred travels the coast and the river Temes in the good ship Spearhafoc, powered by 40 rowers struggling against tides and currents. He and his men fight furious battles, and he lustily impales foes with his favorite sword, Serpent-Breath. “I don’t kill the helpless,” though, which is one of his few limits. So, early in the story, when a man calling himself “God’s chosen one” declares “We were sent to kill you,” readers may chuckle and say yeah, right. But Uhtred faces true challenges such as Waormund, “lord Æthelhelm’s beast.” Immense bloodletting aside, Cornwell paints vivid images of the filth in the Temes and in cities like Lundene. This is mainly manly fare, of course. Few women are active characters. The queen needs rescuing, and “when queens call for help, warriors go to war.” The action is believable if often gruesome and loathsome, and it never lets up for long.
This is historical adventure on a grand scale, right up there with the works of Conn Iggulden and Minette Walters.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256321-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
© 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.
