A harrowing tale of loss and remembrance, often bleak but also lit with a hard-earned wisdom and grace.
Violence rends an Indian American clan in this plangent saga of family, migration, and estrangement.
Wieland’s narrative opens with the murder of Djuna Malik, an Indian American freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her two housemates by a racist man who lived down the street. Mourning her are her much older sister, Nisha, who raised her after their parents were killed in a terrorist attack in Mumbai, and her Lit professor, Liam McFadden, who feels she’s a talented writer and shows her class writings to Nisha after toying with the idea of plagiarizing them as material for his own novel. Liam and Nisha bond over Djuna’s journal and begin an affair. Nisha tells her own story to Liam, which includes her rape by an American youth in India, which led to further tragedy when her vengeful Indian lover at Harvard accidentally blew up himself, his brother, and uncle, with a bomb intended for Nisha’s attacker. She also ruminates on her tense marriage with Michael, a depressed white man with lots of guns and seething resentments. Meanwhile, Liam is wrestling with his own past growing up in Ireland. His father, a famous novelist, was so enraged that Liam’s mother published her own novel that she never finished another one, and he also plagiarized the work of Liam’s brother, Shamus, a talented and volatile poet. After he dropped dead of a heart attack during an argument with Shamus, more tragedy followed. Throughout, Nisha and Liam ponder the dead, while Nisha untangles yet more fraught relationships with Felicity, a friend and also the mother of Djuna’s killer, and Jamie, a troubled friend of Djuna’s.
Wieland’s novel works with big themes, including the experience of Indian immigrants eager to pursue the American dream but subject to racist affronts from microaggressions to homicide, and the problems of the story’s many angry men, with a first-term Donald Trump being a distant, presiding spirit who haunts the characters’ anxieties. It’s also an atmospheric portrait of the modern university, capturing the classroom torpor, the energetic zeal of its protest culture, the flurry of squabbling and empty-nest sorrow that surrounds Nisha’s relationship with Djuna as she leaves home, and the central role that prestigious degrees play in shaping the identity and self-esteem of the professional classes. (Djuna is distraught when her dream colleges reject her and she must settle for Chapel Hill, still one of the best schools in the country.) These are big themes, and Wieland explores them with psychological nuance and exactitude in prose that sometimes has a lyrical stillness and other times opens out into harsh, raw feeling (When tragedy strikes, Nisha’s “wailing afterwards was so loud and so long it seemed the sound came from the hospital building, out of the walls and floors, the drywall, the pipes, the wiring, the invisible Internet signal”). Wieland handles this sometimes unbearably dark material with evocative writing that packs an emotional wallop.
A harrowing tale of loss and remembrance, often bleak but also lit with a hard-earned wisdom and grace.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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