by Louis Flint Ceci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2022
A less-focused but affecting installment about earnest Southern teens.
A young gay man confronts his town and its history in the fourth novel in the Croy Cycle series.
It’s 1970, the summer before basketball star Jake Jacobs’ senior year, and he’s just passed on a chance to spend it in Paris, France, with his thespian mother. Instead, he wants to remain in Croy, Oklahoma, where he moved two years ago. Things aren’t quite what they used to be—his friend and old crush, Randy Edom, hasn’t been around since he graduated and inherited a large sum of money—but Jake’s best pal, Joanie Tibbits, is still around. He also has a new flame, Beau Hamilton, a sensitive musician who enjoys secretly wearing women’s undergarments. Together with other friends, Jake and Beau form a rock band called the Quirks—a nod to its members’ idiosyncrasies—and find cathartic musical expression for their angst. Joanie, the editor of the school paper, launches an investigation into a controversial sculpture that once adorned the local library. Why was it removed, and what became of it? Randy returns home to take care of his ailing mother, Virginia, and come to terms with some family history that he’s ignored for too long. The era’s cultural upheavals also begin to manifest in the town’s social life: Young men are coming home from Vietnam with unspoken horror stories locked up in their injured bodies, and many in Croy are unwilling to accept loves and lifestyles that don’t conform to conservative Christian morality. Jake has just one year left in town, but is that enough time to put its ghosts to rest?
Over the course of this novel, Ceci effectively infuses the prose with the well-developed personalities of its characters, as when Randy visits his sick mother: “Virginia smiled like she’d just awoken from a good dream. She waved one of her IV lines. ‘You look like you could use some of this.’ ‘Does it kill the pain?’ ‘No. It just sets it in a corner.’ ” At another point, the work gets across the exuberance that the characters feel when performing music: “Jake grinned and covered his ears. Belle looked like she was howling, but he couldn’t hear her.” Although the previous two books in the series worked well as stand-alone YA novels, this one relies more heavily on storylines established in the earlier volumes; as such, fans of the Croy Cycle are sure to appreciate this latest entry, but new readers would do well to catch up with previous books first. Overall, it feels less like a standard YA tale than a larger story of small-town life and the interactions of families that have deep, interconnected roots. As in the previous entries, there’s a queer coming-of-age storyline, but here, it’s somewhat diluted by other, less urgent plotlines. For example, the library sculpture seems to hold a lot of metaphorical weight, but the reader may have trouble getting too invested in its fate. (Crosby’s occasional black-and-white line drawings feature characters and objects from the text.)
A less-focused but affecting installment about earnest Southern teens.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73473-897-1
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Les Croyens Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Louis Flint Ceci ; illustrated by Jennifer Rain Crosby
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by Louis Flint Ceci ; illustrated by Jennifer Rain Crosby
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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by Leigh Bardugo ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2024
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.
In 16th-century Madrid, a crypto-Jew with a talent for casting spells tries to steer clear of the Inquisition.
Luzia Cotado, a scullion and an orphan, has secrets to keep: “It was a game she and her mother had played, saying one thing and thinking another, the bits and pieces of Hebrew handed down like chipped plates.” Also handed down are “refranes”—proverbs—in “not quite Spanish, just as Luzia was not quite Spanish.” When Luzia sings the refranes, they take on power. “Aboltar cazal, aboltar mazal” (“A change of scene, a change of fortune”) can mend a torn gown or turn burnt bread into a perfect loaf; “Quien no risica, no rosica” (“Whoever doesn’t laugh, doesn’t bloom”) can summon a riot of foliage in the depths of winter. The Inquisition hangs over the story like Chekhov’s famous gun on the wall. When Luzia’s employer catches her using magic, the ambitions of both mistress and servant catapult her into fame and danger. A new, even more ambitious patron instructs his supernatural servant, Guillén Santángel, to train Luzia for a magical contest. Santángel, not Luzia, is the familiar of the title; he has been tricked into trading his freedom and luck to his master’s family in exchange for something he no longer craves but can’t give up. The novel comes up against an issue common in fantasy fiction: Why don’t the characters just use their magic to solve all their problems? Bardugo has clearly given it some thought, but her solutions aren’t quite convincing, especially toward the end of the book. These small faults would be harder to forgive if she weren’t such a beautiful writer. Part fairy tale, part political thriller, part romance, the novel unfolds like a winter tree bursting into unnatural bloom in response to one of Luzia’s refranes, as she and Santángel learn about power, trust, betrayal, and love.
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781250884251
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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