Dizzying, unsettling, and extremely smart.
A Londoner is the subject of a surreal trial in this kaleidoscopic novel.
Sterling Beckenbauer knows a thing or two about loss. “Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism,” they reflect. “Lost my country to conservativism, my language to PTSD.” And after they’re set upon outside their flat in Camden Town in London by several bullfighters, they’re in danger of losing their freedom—while later, at a football match, they’re accosted by two police officers dressed as club officials who inform them that they’re being arrested for assaulting the bullfighters. (They later learn they’re also being charged with “forcing arresting officers to go to Hendon, Travel Zone 4, on a Saturday.”) The timing couldn’t be worse for Sterling, who’s just about to launch the latest installment of Cataclysmic Foibles—“a quarterly series of DIY artists’ plays”—with their “bestie,” Chachki Smok, a costume designer. Things then take a turn when Sterling learns that they’ll be allowed to stage the next play, but only if it also functions as their trial. And as for that trial, it’s presided over by a judge who’s “a tall, blue-bodied frog, spindly, with the head of a fledgling bird,” and the spectators include “a pig in a religious habit” and others with “frog-shaped white hearts beating in, or on, their funnel-shaped chests.” Add to all this a time-traveling doppelgänger, a spaceship, and a “PINK SPIRE WAKING UP APROPOS OF NOTHING AND COMING FOR ME WITH ITS CRUSTACEAN LIMBS AND ITS HAIR-FINE JETS,” and you have a novel that defies the laws of literary physics—Waidner seems incapable of not surprising their readers, and the novel, despite its serious themes, seems like it had to be incredibly fun to write. Still, it’s a sobering look at the way underrepresented communities—migrants, nonbinary people—are treated: “They know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a system poised against them; to be positioned as the aggressor, the danger, when having nothing, nothing, on the other side.” This novel is part Franz Kafka, part Hieronymus Bosch, and part Monty Python, but mostly it’s completely sui generis. And it succeeds on every level a novel can.
Dizzying, unsettling, and extremely smart.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781644452134
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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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