Richly described, if uneven, tales with some memorable characters.
This second installment of a series offers more interconnected short stories about madcap outsiders who live in the fictional Green Valley.
In The Ballad of Jinx Jenkins (2018), Sommers introduced an enigmatic vagrant whom the people of Green Valley had proclaimed an omen of bad luck. In the opening of this sequel, Jinx stands with a noose around his neck, facing death. Similarly, Green Valley is in the death grip of the dreaded BigCorp, an avaricious private company intent on gobbling up land and pushing Sniff, a highly addictive drug, to locals. In the tale “The Life of Jinx Jenkins,” it is revealed that Jinx once worked for BigCorp, and his downfall was initiated by its future CEO, Jason Big, who claims credit for the protagonist’s SkyTram designs. Other stories tell tales of the people of Green Valley—from its disgruntled blue-collar workers, such as Grackle and Crag who toil in a sweet factory, to its wannabee superheroes, including “The Errant Knight,” an offbeat Don Quixote, and “The Starling,” a female hacker intent on implanting a virus in the BigCorp servers. The pervading theme in this collection is the corrosive nature of capitalist enterprise. Sommers poignantly describes the fallout experienced as a result of BigCorp’s industrial ventures: “The problem was the mess the smog left behind, staining every tree, building, and car in a gray-green tint. A thick, sticky film seeped into one’s consciousness, their will, their sense of being.” In Jinx, the author astutely creates a complex character whose deterioration mirrors that of the valley. Imagery of Jinx decaying on the streets is graphic and impactful: “The grape-sized infection on his knuckle throbbed so hard it split itself open.” Sommers’ introduction of various superheroes is less successful. The Errant Knight’s foppishly archaic diction injects some levity: “I shall have the most immaculate cut of meat you have…adorned with your freshest comestibles.” But the author gets caught up in recounting each superhero’s backstory, which, along with the group’s predictable crime-fighting capers, becomes tediously repetitive. Sommers also sometimes uses racial slurs needlessly: “Wops and Spooks and Spics.” This volume displays many of the markings of a talented writer, although there are some off-putting elements.
Richly described, if uneven, tales with some memorable characters.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948309-92-9
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Transmundane Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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PERSPECTIVES
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