A delightful novel filled with warmth, music, and an obvious love of Bach.
A young boy sings for Johann Sebastian Bach in this richly textured tale of music and life.
After Bach’s death in 1750, organ-maker Stefan Silbermann recalls a part of his boyhood in 1723, when his widowed father sends him to Leipzig to try out for a boys’ choir under Bach, then a church cantor. Bach’s goal is to set to music passages from the Bible, specifically the Passion according to Saint Matthew, for Good Friday. He accepts the carrot-haired Stefan, who has a beautiful voice that causes jealousy and prompts bullying from the other boys. Early on, Stefan learns that the boys must do their homework or their teacher (not Bach) will “smite” them with a cane. He runs away but returns and spends time in the school’s prison for another’s offense. Then Bach invites him to live for a while with his family in a home filled with musical instruments and people, “a place without privacy and a world without secrets.” Meanwhile, Stefan finds favor with Anna Magdalena, Bach’s second wife, and Catharina, his oldest child. Anna Magdalena has a wonderful singing voice and blue eyes that remind him of flowers. As a woman, she is not permitted to sing in church. Stefan and Catharina have a sweet friendship as they chase butterflies together and he begins to love her, but she only likes him back. Though demanding, Bach is a kind and deeply religious man. “Without charity we are nothing,” he tells Stefan, “no more than a sounding brass or tinkling cymbal....We are all orphans before the Lord.” Yet the great man has a sense of humor. “You know that Luther wrote ‘Ein fest Burg’ when he was sitting on the privy?” “No.” “A musical prayer written mid-crap. You can’t be proud when imagination strikes.” The story is rich in its descriptions of music, devotion to God, and the daily hardships of 18th-century life. And finally, this is perhaps the author’s best description: A man’s face “had a tinge of waxen yellow to it, as if an embalmer had started work but left off for his lunch.”
A delightful novel filled with warmth, music, and an obvious love of Bach.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63557-067-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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