A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.
Two strangers are unknowingly connected by a rare manuscript.
Maxwell Moreau, born to a pirate father and a Dominican immigrant mother in New Orleans in 1920, has a childhood in which he is surrounded by his parents’ stories. His mother, Adana Moreau, learns to read in English with Maxwell at her side. She writes a well-received science fiction novel, Lost City, but becomes gravely ill before finishing the sequel, A Model Earth; she and Maxwell burn the manuscript before she dies . The pirate travels north in search of work, and Maxwell is effectively an orphan when his father fails to meet him as planned in Chicago. Nearly 80 years later, a man named Saul is grieving the death of his grandfather, his only family after his parents were killed in a terrorist attack in Israel. Shortly before dying, his grandfather had asked Saul to mail a package for him to someone named Maxwell Moreau at a university in Chile. When the package is returned some time later, Saul takes on the task of finding Maxwell, now a well-known physicist who theorizes about parallel universes, to give him the papers inside—the same manuscript Adana Moreau had burned so many years earlier—and fulfill his grandfather’s last request. This search takes Saul and his friend Javier to New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina, and the two reflect on their friendship and Saul’s grandfather’s work as a historian as Javier documents the extensive loss of life in an effort to bear witness. Zapata’s debut novel is a wonderful merging of adventure with thoughtful but urgent meditations on time, history, and surviving tragedy. The characters are richly drawn, and the prose is striking: “They drove east, back the way they had come, and the road seemed to take on an extra-temporal quality, like they were traveling backward in time. We’re already meeting ourselves coming the other way, he thought as the Cadillac sped on and on and on.”
A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-335-01012-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An engaging, inclusive debut.
A young woman with cognitive disabilities finds inspiration in Viking legends and prepares herself to become a hero when her brother gets involved with drug dealers.
Zelda knows she’s different than most people she meets, and she understands that difference is because of something called fetal alcohol syndrome. She has seen the unkind glances and heard the muttered slurs, but really, she just wants what any 21-year-old wants: love, acceptance, and some degree of independence to make decisions about her life. Also? A really good sword would be useful. Zelda is obsessed with Vikings—their legends, their fierce loyalty, their courage in the face of danger. Like the ancient clans, she finds strength in her tribe: her older brother, Gert, and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, AK47, plus her helpful therapist and her friends at the community center, especially her boyfriend, Marxy. He isn’t the best kisser, but he’s willing to try sex, a subject about which Zelda is definitely curious. But when Gert struggles to pay the bills and gets involved with dangerous drug dealers, Zelda knows she has to step in and help him whatever the cost. “The hero in a Viking legend is always smaller than the villain,” she reasons. “That is what makes it a legend.” In this engaging debut novel, MacDonald skillfully balances drama and violence with humor, highlighting how an unorthodox family unit is still a family. He’s never condescending, and his frank examination of the real issues facing cognitively disabled adults—sexuality, employment, independence—is bracing and compassionate. With Zelda, he’s created an unforgettable character, one whose distinctive voice is entertaining and inspiring. Will appeal to fans of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
An engaging, inclusive debut.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2676-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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