A raucous, poignant exploration of the blood ties that bind…and chafe.
A 12-year-old girl, her mom, and their elderly landlady support each other through family separation, violence, and much kvetching banter in this warmhearted family saga.
Nicholas’ novel unfolds at the turn of the 21st century and centers around Maureen LeeRoyce, a 30-ish widow who waitresses and cleans houses to support her daughter Kalayla—Cambridge, Massachusetts’ most obstreperous 12-year-old. Almost as cantankerous is their septuagenarian neighbor and landlady Lena Barzetti, who lends Kalayla a helping hand and unwanted advice. Both have spectacularly fractured families. Maureen was disowned by her Irish Catholic mother for marrying Kalayla’s father Jamal, a Black man and a Protestant to boot; when Kalayla learns about the rejection (Maureen had told her that the maternal side of the family all died in an explosion before she was born), she has an emotional meltdown that Lena trudges in to repair. Lena’s own fraught past includes savage beatings at the hands of her now-deceased husband, the disappearance of one of her sons, and the deaths of two others in combat in the Vietnam War. Balm for the ladies’ wounded souls appears in the persons of Matthew Eccli II (called Mattwo), Lena’s high school flame, and his son, Rico, a 30-something hunk who’s next in line to run the family karate dojo and starts paying welcome attention to Maureen. Kalayla meets her cousin Kieran, which initiates a drift toward reconciliation between Maureen and her parents, and Maureen resumes her ambition to be an artist (with Lena’s help). But even as things seem to be looking up for Maureen and Kalayla, they must confront the increasingly menacing presence of Jamal’s mentally unstable brother Clarence, who becomes obsessed with Maureen.
Nicholas’ yarn is an engrossing look at families that unravel and must be painfully knitted back together and the knotted, traumatic histories that give rise to unforgivable sins that must somehow be forgiven. The author crafts sharply etched, vibrant, prickly characters who resonate despite their differences; Kalayla and Lena, in particular, are two tough cookies (as fiercely protective of loved ones as they are annoyingly critical of them) who have their own internal weaknesses that sometimes make them break. Nicholas’ portrait of Kalayla is brilliant—she’s a pitch-perfect smart, sullen tween, full of prickly attitude and rigid, juvenile moralizing dragged kicking and screaming toward adult complexity—all rendered in an adolescent’s crudely vigorous language. (“I hated that I felt sorry for him, hated that I couldn’t tell him he was a jerk and a butthole and a rotten uncle and a disgusting brother. I hated that I couldn’t hate him the way I wanted to.”) Lena displays a singular voice in her own right as she helps Kalayla figure it all out in her acerbic, exasperated dudgeon (“You don’t understand your mama at all! She does stupid things just like you, me, and everybody else! You’re the one who put her on the Perfect Mama Pedestal. She never belonged there. Nobody does”). The result is an entertaining saga about the wisdom that grudgingly passes from old to young.
A raucous, poignant exploration of the blood ties that bind…and chafe.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9798218572617
Page Count: 377
Publisher: KDP
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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: yesterday
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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