A cleverly imagined tale of psychic repression and escape from it.
An illicit Dungeons & Dragons manual sparks a revolution within a young North Korean.
Cho Jun-su, the hero of Theroux’s expert, engrossing seventh novel, is 11 when he fatefully discovers a copy of a Dungeon Masters Guide—a foreign visitor left it behind at the hotel where Jun-su’s father works. Jun-su is frightened by the book’s inscrutable contents—foreign media is suspect under the dictatorship’s iron rule—but he begins to decipher the book with the help of an English-speaking teacher, who dubs the game the House of Possibility. D&D’s core concepts of assuming different roles and having multiple life choices are baffling but inspiring for the young man, who soon gets attention for his inventive poetry—work that in time introduces him to the nation’s elite. Theroux offers a cross section of North Korean society, from brutal work camps where assassinations are common to the wealthy, druggy orbit of Kim Jong Il’s friends and family to the desperate efforts of bureaucrats to cadge money for its starving people via ransomware and insurance fraud. But the heart of the story is consistently Jun-su, who navigates the traditional matters of maturity—love, sex, friendship—alongside a growing understanding of opportunities and mindsets that his friends and family aren’t privy to. (When his D&D knowledge is discovered, he becomes both an object of fascination for academics and a target for persecution.) That makes the novel a remarkable bildungsroman; here, identity is both blossoming and severely suppressed. (As Theroux writes. “How did someone created by one reality begin to operate by the rules of another?”) Theroux’s deliberately flat, investigative-reporter tone clarifies the crisis—Jun-su is in a society stripped of anything decadent, and Theroux lets the twists of Jun-su's adventure, not the prose, sell the story.
A cleverly imagined tale of psychic repression and escape from it.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-6680-0266-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
