It doesn’t get more elegiac than this.
Visits to a Civil War–era boardinghouse, a hospice in the Bronx, and the underworld.
“WELL, THAT WAS WEIRD” is Finn's answer when asked what words of wisdom he would like inscribed on his tombstone—by his dead ex-girlfriend, whom he has retrieved from the green cemetery where she was buried and is now giving a lift to...the other side. IT CERTAINLY WAS, thinks the reader of the novel Finn occupies. This otherworldly fairy tale opens with a letter written by the proprietress of an inn in the Confederate South to her sister, describing some trouble she is having with a handsome boarder. One is slightly bewildered, but also relieved, to find the second section of the book transporting us to what Finn, a recently fired schoolteacher, thinks of as "No York," home of neighborhoods NoHo, NoMad (“of course that was where he was staying”), and Nolita (“Didn't he date her in high school? Or rather, junior high?”). On the way to see his brother, Max, on his deathbed, Finn is planning some patter to amuse him, and if you know Moore, you can foresee that this will be some fine patter indeed. But then Finn is torn away from “the bardo of the hospice [with] its trapped souls and the steel beds and alarmingly colored drinks” by a phone call informing him of the suicide of his one-time girlfriend Lily, who had left him for another man but in death will be his alone. The story of Lily and Finn’s road trip and their passionate banter about life and death and love is interspersed with more letters from the landlady. Perhaps you will understand why, but if not you can focus on other Moore-ish delights, among them extraordinarily lovely descriptions of the hues and aromas of a decomposing body.
It doesn’t get more elegiac than this.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780307594143
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A novel that reminds its readers that racism forges its own lasting, unbearable nightmares.
No matter how much you’ll want to look away from the callous injustice and horrific abuse depicted here, this period thriller’s investment of urgency and imagination keeps you riveted.
It's 1950 and the relatively sheltered life of Robert Stephens, a 12-year-old African American boy living in Florida, is changed forever when he comes to the aid of his older sister, Gloria, who is harassed by the teenage son of their town’s wealthiest white man. Though Robert does nothing more than kick Lyle McCormack, reprisals only begin with Lyle’s father brutally boxing Robert’s right ear. Robert is soon handcuffed, dragged away by police, and given a quick trial. He's sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, euphemistically known as “The Reformatory,” an institution known for racism and brutality toward its adolescent population. Thirty years before, a fire at the school killed 25 boys, many of whom were buried in a gravesite on the grounds along with the bodies of other inmates who died prematurely (and mysteriously). Somehow, Robert can communicate with these dead boys’ ghosts, and the institution’s creepy and corrupt Warden Haddock promises Robert early release if he will somehow help him put these “haints” in something called a “collection jar.” And yes, the spirits are out to get the warden, too. For revenge. But mostly, they want Robert to help set them free and let them be at peace. Meanwhile, Gloria is fiercely, doggedly determined to set Robert free, using whatever legal means are available to a young Black woman in the still-segregated South, including the NAACP. Like Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer–winning The Nickel Boys (2019), this novel is based on Florida’s infamous Dozier School for Boys. Due brings her own gifts in the supernatural-fantasy genre as well as elements of her own family history (the book is dedicated in part to her great-uncle, who died at Dozier in 1937) to this vividly realized page-turner, which is at once an ingenious ghost story, a white-knuckle adventure, and an illuminating if infuriating look back at a shameful period in American jurisprudence that, somehow, doesn’t seem so far away.
A novel that reminds its readers that racism forges its own lasting, unbearable nightmares.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781982188344
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Poignant, fresh, and often devastating.
A 12-year-old girl struggles to come of age in the wake of personal tragedy in 1970s Brazil.
“They took Mita away in the month of Ruby, and now we are in Sapphire.” Dolores Hamilton keeps time using her beloved birthstone calendar, marking off the days since her parents sent her identical twin sister, Mita, who has cerebral palsy and epilepsy, to live at a hospital in their father’s native England. Since Mita’s departure, Dolores and her parents have moved from their small town of Santanésia, Brazil to the high society of Rio de Janeiro. Dolores has had no formal schooling and can’t read or write, and now she’s sent to the British school against her will. There she tries to find her place among girls who whisper about her behind her back and teachers whose cruelty is only thinly veiled. Dolores’ desperation to express her feelings about the loss of her sister is hindered by her inability to write; nor can she speak of Mita with her parents, who turn away from any mention of their missing daughter. The loss of Mita is made all the more gut-wrenching as scenes from the twins’ childhood in Santanésia are woven throughout the novel. In Rio, Dolores slowly finds community through a new friend, Andrea, and a sympathetic teacher who helps her learn to write. Now Dolores can send letters to Mita, but when months go by without a response, she vacillates between worrying that Mita hates her or, perhaps worse, has forgotten her. Faithfull seamlessly blends Dolores’ personal journey with an occasionally scathing portrayal of life in Brazil in the 1970s, particularly through the story of Sofia, a trans sex worker who befriends Dolores. While Faithfull’s novel is filled with multilayered characters—with the exception of Dolores’ mother, who sometimes falls flat—it is Dolores’ reckoning with the loss of her other half that is the heartbeat of the novel: “Now, when I look in the mirror, I just see me. It used to be Mita there, looking back at me. So much has changed.”
Poignant, fresh, and often devastating.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798217153886
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Thousand Voices/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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