A midlife crisis story stifled by enough material for several TED talks.
An Egyptologist-turned–hospice worker contemplates the mysteries of fate, mortality, and love.
Picoult’s obsession here is the power of choices and what can happen when they are made under pressure. Dawn, a graduate student in Egyptology, is abruptly called back to Boston from a dig in Egypt by a family emergency. Her mother, who raised her and her brother, Kieran, alone, is in hospice, dying. This death and other circumstances conspire to derail Dawn’s cherished career—now she must raise Kieran, who is only 13. Security is offered by Brian, a physicist at Harvard, whom she marries after discovering she's pregnant. For 15 years, she curates a different life than the one she had planned. She’s now a “death doula,” a concierge hospice worker contracted by the moribund to help wind up loose ends. For Dawn’s client Win, winding up involves getting in touch with a lost love, abandoned for another life. Win’s situation evokes in Dawn renewed longing for her own lost love, Wyatt, an English earl she left behind at the dig. When fault lines emerge in her marriage and teenage daughter Meret is being extra surly, might-have-beens beckon. The nonlinear narrative ricochets between Dawn’s Boston life and her sojourns—past and present—in Egypt. The chronology can be confusing—and, in the case of the prologue, deliberately misleading, it seems. There are no datelines or other guideposts except for periodic headings like "Water/Boston” and “Land/Egypt.” Water and Land reference the “Two Ways,” alternate routes to the afterlife in Egyptian mythology. Whether on death and dying, archaeology, or quantum physics, Picoult’s erudition overload far exceeds the interests of verisimilitude or theme. Do lectures on multiverses bring us any closer to parsing Dawn’s epiphanous epigram—“We don’t make decisions. Our decisions make us”? This much is clear: The characters’ professions are far better defined than their motivations.
A midlife crisis story stifled by enough material for several TED talks.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984818-35-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
A touching story of love and grief ends in an epic battle of good versus evil.
Roberts’ latest may move you to tears, or joy, or dread, or all three.
Every summer, John and Cora Fox visit Cora’s mother, Lucy Lannigan, in Redbud Hollow, Kentucky, leaving their children, 12-year-old Thea and 10-year-old Rem, for a two-week taste of heaven. The children love Grammie Lucy far more than John’s snooty family, which looks down on Cora. Lucy, a healer with deep Appalachian roots, loves animals, cooks the best meals, plays musical instruments, and makes soap and candles for her thriving business. Thea—who’s inherited the psychic abilities passed down through the women of Lucy’s family—has vivid magical dreams, one of which becomes a living nightmare when a psychopath robs and murders John and Cora as Thea watches helplessly. Thea’s description of the killer and her ability to see him in real time help the skeptical police catch Ray Riggs, who goes to prison for life. Although Thea and Rem go on to have a wonderful childhood with Grammie, Thea constantly wages a mental battle with Riggs, who tries to use his own psychic abilities to get into her mind. Over the years, Thea uses her imagination to become a game designer while the more business-minded Rem helps manage her career. Thea eventually builds a house near Lucy, where a newly arrived neighbor is her teen crush, singer-songwriter Tyler Brennan. Tyler has his own issues and is protective of his young son but slowly builds a loving relationship with Thea, whose silence about her abilities leads to a devastating misunderstanding. At first Thea tries to keep Riggs locked out of her mind. As her powers grow, she torments him. Finally, she realizes that she must win this battle and destroy him if she’s ever to have peace.
A touching story of love and grief ends in an epic battle of good versus evil.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781250289698
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Shteyngart is doing his most important work ever, illuminating the current tragedy with humor, smarts, and heart.
A brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country.
“It was said by both her pediatrician and her psychologist that Vera, while presenting as a very bright ten-year-old, suffered from intense anxiety.” Vera Bradford-Shmulkin really does have a lot on her plate for a kid. Among the 23 chapter titles in this slim and explosively lovely novel: “She had to hold the family together.” “She had to survive recess.” “She had to expand her Things I Still Need to Know Diary.” “She had to figure out if Daddy was a traitor.” “She had to fall asleep.” The novel is set in a delicately constructed near future, with self-driving cars and smart chessboards and a proposed constitutional amendment that will give an “‘enhanced vote’…counting for five-thirds of a regular vote to so-called ‘exceptional Americans,’ those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.” These are the words of Vera’s teacher, who is dividing the class into teams to debate the topic. She makes half-Korean, half-Russian Vera the lead for the pro-Five-Three side, while the opposition will be led by an "exceptional American" type her parents call Moncler Stephen because of his jacket. Winning this debate is another thing Vera has to do, along with getting up the nerve to deliver “Ten Great Things About Daddy and Why You Should Stay Together with Him,” and its counterpart, “Six Great Things About Mom” to the parents in question, who fight constantly. This mom is the one she calls “Anne mom,” her WASP stepmother Anne Bradford; “Mom Mom,” her Korean biological mother, has long been out of the picture and she has never known why. (“She had to find out the truth about Mom Mom.”) This book is about so many things: the drama of the gifted child, nativism and immigrant culture (“She had to visit Baba Tanya and Grandpa Boris in the suburbs”), technology and oppression, the role of intellectuals, the way we learn language. As the political situation in the United States evolves, Shteyngart’s particular flavor of black humor—Russian wry?—reconnects with its roots in sorrow and resistance and becomes essential and lifesaving.
Shteyngart is doing his most important work ever, illuminating the current tragedy with humor, smarts, and heart.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593595091
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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