An unusual take on undocumented immigration that makes for a strong debut.
A teenager in rural Washington gets tangled up in his South Korean roots.
Bucky, the narrator, runs more than his fair share of high school hurdles. He’s a perpetual outsider, one of three Asians at his school, including a Korean American classmate named Chantal who keeps flipping him the bird. His birth mother died in South Korea. He’s living in a trailer home with his White American stepmom, Sheryl. She had married Bucky’s Korean birth father, but he later abandoned them. The boy has just had his hopes of a college football scholarship dashed when his Uncle Rick’s failed suicide attempt soon leads to a shooting incident that lands Bucky in jail facing policemen who suspect him of terrorism. They discover that he’s undocumented thanks to his father’s misfiled immigration documents and a bounced check. After some time in a detention center, where he must refer to himself as Bed Forty-Two, he’s flown to South Korea. He doesn’t speak the language, so he’s still a fish out of water. He learns that he’s officially a Korean citizen and faces another fresh hell: mandatory military service in his new homeland. Bucky is clever but impetuous and tends to handle challenges as if it’s third and goal, charging forward with head down, legs churning. Milan throws a lot at him, putting him through the seven stages of grief as his old life fades away and he’s pulled deeper into an ugly tale of by-the-book repatriation. Bucky could end up in the DMZ. It’s dark stuff, but Milan sustains in his narrator an amusingly bewildered, blundering, bumptious voice along with a leavening sense of absurdity. There are echoes here of Heller’s Yossarian and even of the 1966 film The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.
An unusual take on undocumented immigration that makes for a strong debut.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781324035657
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
Endlessly quotable, highly entertaining, bordering on overly absurd, but perfect for book club consumption.
What do super-hot sorority girls and an assistant professor who’s a new mom have in common? Being a woman is hard.
Told from the perspectives of Sloane, a new mother experiencing an identity crisis, and Nina, a pledge sister at The House, the sorority that will be her ticket to lifelong success, Blake’s novel uses sarcasm, wit, and unwavering honesty to view the realities of womanhood—“femininity as a social construct and the ways in which it was an unsolvable curse”—through a satirical microscope. While Sloane and Nina, on paper, could not be more different, their lives are connected via The House when Sloane becomes the faculty adviser—“The House [w]as the ultimate safe place…something of near-magical significance. Sisterhood, Sloane learned, was a proper noun, as in: The House was a hearth for Sisterhood, where The Women grew into themselves.” The master puppeteer of this magical Sisterhood is Alex, a high-powered lawyer, single mom, and sorority alumni mentor who befriends Sloane as a fellow mom during a moment in need and draws her further and further into her influential circle. Alex represents women who have a seat at the table, women who are in control, who rise above the patriarchy. Sloane, jaded by the impossible ideal of the “Good Woman,” and Nina, enthusiastic to the point of desperation, are both drawn to Alex’s bewitching we-can-have-it-all aura, the unspoken mantra that hums through The House. However, the more they become entwined in the rituals of Sisterhood, the more they understand that beauty is just a facade and what lies beneath is much more sinister and downright surprising—you’ll see! The growing absurdism of the women’s desire to break the system, to achieve more, to rise against their common enemy—men—threatens to engulf itself during one final House dinner.
Endlessly quotable, highly entertaining, bordering on overly absurd, but perfect for book club consumption.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781250883452
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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