by Jessie Greengrass ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 2022
A bleak, poignant, impressive contribution to an ever growing genre, the fiction of climate catastrophe.
British author Greengrass' latest is a grim and often moving hybrid, a post-apocalyptic climate change novel with a doomed domestic idyll tucked inside.
Francesca is a renowned climate change activist, ever more in demand as her bleak, accurate predictions earn her a reputation as a Cassandra. As the global situation deteriorates, she more and more leaves her teenage stepdaughter, Caro, in charge of her young son, Pauly, and the two half siblings develop a powerful bond. (Francesca's husband, the children's father, has begun traveling with her to aid her work.) Francesca is a fascinating character—high-minded, laser-focused, sanctimonious, apparently allergic to joy; her neglect has a sadness in it, too, that of the parent who feels called to "higher" duty and who, it will turn out, has done the best she can in the ways that align with her skills and her inclinations. Just before she and her husband are killed in a storm on the East Coast of the U.S., Francesca tells Caro to decamp from London with Pauly to a remote bluffside home that she's worked, unbeknownst to the kids, to make into a refuge, a well-stocked, mostly self-sustaining hidy-hole. Francesca has hired as caretakers an irascible young woman named Sal and her grandfather. Caro and Pauly arrive just in time to learn of Francesca’s and their father's deaths, and they settle in to the high house for whatever slow and limping limbo humankind has left to it. The book's great strength is in the way it depicts this period. There's no large-scale hope or drama remaining; choices made long ago have wreaked their irreversible damage, and all that's left for the four is to sustain themselves quietly, with whatever portion of peace and pleasure they can manage, for as long as possible. Greengrass excels in her account of this makeshift family—the sweet but fading Grandy, the two women who often see themselves as rivals, and the curious, growing, bird-crazy Pauly—and their attempts to live on and with and through a land that is increasingly inhospitable.
A bleak, poignant, impressive contribution to an ever growing genre, the fiction of climate catastrophe.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982180-11-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2024
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
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Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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by Liz Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2024
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.
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Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.
One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593418918
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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