A bleak, engrossing tale of the seemingly endless damage that brutality causes.
In this debut novella, a group of Americans can’t escape the inevitability of violence.
Gracie is the daughter of a hardened criminal. Her father is a known murderer who always carries a gun and gets drunk every night. Gracie can’t help but witness some of his ferocity, as when a carjacker tries stealing her dad’s beloved car. Elsewhere, young Robbie regularly fishes with his adult friend Paw Paw. The two, as people of color, habitually deal with bigots. But Paw Paw is an “old school” gangster who uses his giant hands to fight to the death. This book contains an assortment of narrators, each with a tie to someone else. There’s a man who retires after winning the lottery. Now he has everything he wants, but when he sets his sights on a young girl, he’s practically welcoming trouble. One boy grows up in a household with devout Christian parents. This entails summers at a camp that teaches outdoor survival. There, he trains with guns and learns combat skills, which he uses during savage confrontations with other “followers.” Gherardi’s brisk but grim story cycles through a plethora of irredeemable characters. The innocent titular youngsters are surrounded by killers, racists, and child abusers. The author deftly shifts among clearly defined characters with discernible narrative voices. Likewise, the nonlinear tale’s varying time periods, though unspecified, are never confusing. For example, some characters note another’s death only for the deceased to narrate a later chapter. In this absorbing story, Gherardi’s relaxed prose reads like people relaying their tales to others. Robbie, describing his mother’s unfortunate state, says: “Mom was on the bad path. No fairy tale ending to her story. Close to the end, I hate to admit. Looking skinnier and weaker every time I saw her. Looked like she was losing hair, too.”
A bleak, engrossing tale of the seemingly endless damage that brutality causes.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-09-832119-2
Page Count: 138
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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