Clever and exasperating by turns, a mishmash of poetry, The Princess Bride, and myths from old worlds and new.
Canadian poet Guriel returns to the whimsical world of Forgotten Work (2020) for an even more bonkers epic.
If Guriel’s fiction debut about a musical scavenger hunt was 1970s-era space rock, this book is full-on Lord of the Rings via Ralph Bakshi with a scattering of cyberpunk tropes to keep things spicy. Like its predecessor, it’s not easy to read unless you’re the sort who finds rhyming couplets roll off the tongue, but the author’s playful disposition and quixotic milieu remain infectious. The book alternates two storylines, juxtaposing a young scholar’s fascination with a famous work of YA fiction with the text of that novel, also composed entirely in rhyme and concerning itself with seafaring werewolves. When Kaye’s friend Cat drags her to a convention celebrating The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, she’s not terribly impressed, but something about the book’s depictions of pirates and monsters gets under her skin, as does the mystery of the book’s author, Mandy Fiction, who vanished into thin air in 2052. Guriel’s book desperately needs focus, but it has plenty of startling imagery to enliven the reader’s journey. There’s clever wordplay satirizing corporate culture (apparently ZuckTube and ZikZok remain inescapable in the future) but also dystopian vistas, like the crater where Kaye lives and where Montreal once stood. Meanwhile, the teenage lycanthropes onboard the Lucy Dread sail treacherous seas in search of a sea monster dubbed a “Moby.” Soon, Kaye is invited by her eccentric professor Emmett Lux to join him for a research assistantship in Japan, where her relationship to Fiction’s fiction becomes even more Byzantine. Those who can manage the linguistic gymnastics needed to navigate the journey—laden with pop-culture references and winking observations about the fickle nature of fan culture—will reap strange rewards.
Clever and exasperating by turns, a mishmash of poetry, The Princess Bride, and myths from old worlds and new.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781771965514
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.
A woman faces a health crisis and obsesses over a local accident in this wonderful follow-up to Sandwich (2024).
Newman begins her latest with a quote from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know—it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.” It sets an appropriate tone for a story that is just as full of death and dread as it is laughter. Two years after the events of Sandwich, Rocky is back home in Western Massachusetts and happily surrounded by family—her daughter, Willa, lives with her and her husband, Nick, while applying to Ph.D. programs; her widowed father, Mort, has moved into the in-law apartment behind their house. When a young man who graduated from high school with Rocky’s son, Jamie, is hit by a train, Rocky finds herself spiraling as she thinks about how close the tragedy came to her own family. She’s also freaking out about a mysterious rash her dermatologist can’t explain. Both instances are tailor-made for internet research and stalking. As Rocky obsessively googles her symptoms and finds only bad news (“Here’s what’s true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don’t write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!”), she also compulsively checks the Facebook page of the accident victim’s mother. Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines (one passage about the absurdity of collecting a stool sample and delivering it to the doctor stands out). As Rocky deals with the byzantine frustrations of the medical system, she also has to learn, once more, how to see her children, husband, father, and herself as fully flawed and lovable humans.
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063453913
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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