"From a wound, beauty rises” in this modern-day Winesburg, Ohio.
A small town’s residents cope with their lives and an American tragedy.
A scream comes across the sky, and there’s nothing to compare to it in Schwille’s quietly contemplative and affecting first novel. On Feb. 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, and debris fell into the water. Schwille imagines that debris fell onto Kiser, a “dinky, third-fiddle” east Texas town near Louisiana. She introduces us to a wide array of locals and their simple lives, now interrupted by search and rescue operations. Schwille’s narrative is told from widely different points of view and employs subtle time shifts going back and forth across years. “Time,” to quote from her Italo Calvino epigraph, “is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.” Kiser suffers from drought, unemployment, multiple divorces, damaged soldiers returning from war, meth labs, anti-gay sentiments, domestic violence, and racism. Wes MacFarland tells us Kiser “wasn’t one of those storybook places.” He’s a struggling, tormented, gay tree-service foreman married to a woman named Holly. Their young, troubled son, Frankie, “heard the shuttle come apart” and came across an “orange space suit wedged in the crook of a tall tree...an astronaut’s torso inside it.” Wes will abandon Kiser, moving to Houston to be with his partner, Ben. Holly will divorce him and marry Pastor Will Simpson, who felt she “had brushed against the devil’s ways.” “Diabetic, Gandhi-thin” Plato Winchester, a “modern-day Davy Crockett,” found “bits of metal, pieces of foam, something he said looked like glass.” A “shoe-less foot, missing one big toe” is found beside Junior Pierce’s mailbox. Gabe Dixon, a poor African-American man, finds a female hand with a ring on it. “The people of Kiser had spread their arms around [this] disaster and accepted the great burden of its grief.”
"From a wound, beauty rises” in this modern-day Winesburg, Ohio.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-938235-42-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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