An intriguing, polarizing tale about a man facing a new life after doing the unforgivable.
A sardonically zany debut novel focuses on a man who kills his girlfriend’s dog—and suffers the consequences.
As Stetz’s book opens, Brian and Amanda are living together in San Diego and seem perfectly happy, with only one little six-pound problem: Boo Boo, Amanda’s beloved dog. Amanda is devoted to Boo Boo, buys him noise-canceling headphones, and fixes him gourmet meals. Although this doesn’t stop her from having a healthy personal and sexual relationship with Brian, it takes up a large amount of her attention. Brian feels like an interloper in his own relationship, and, to make matters worse, he’s convinced that Boo Boo likes to torment him. So one day when Amanda is out shopping and Brian discovers that Boo Boo has pooped in one of his shoes, he impulsively grabs the dog and hurls him through the patio door to the backyard. The problem? The patio door is still closed (“Damn window washers; they’re good”). Boo Boo dies, and Brian is faced with the horrible prospect of telling Amanda. Almost immediately, he decides to begin “the lie parade” and cover up what he’s done, but it ends up being useless. Once Amanda begins telling her story to the world, explosions start going off in Brian’s life. He loses his job and seems permanently blacklisted from finding another; he becomes an infamous figure on social media and in the news; he’s attacked by former flings and accused of further monstrosities; and he’s eventually charged for the killing of Boo Boo and must find a lawyer and face a trial. Along the way, he’s got to deal with the fact that he is now a societal villain.
Stetz’s decision to refrain from making the philandering, callous, self-absorbed, dog-murdering Brian in any way a sympathetic character at first seems counterintuitive, particularly given the book’s slyly dark final twist. The decision takes the normal machinery of the redemption arc narrative and tilts it off-center in interesting ways. As his life slowly, systematically falls apart, Brian encounters strata of society he’d never experienced before, from prison (where a canine killer is scorned even by men who beat their wives) and the courtroom to the shadowy world of dogfighting in the American South (disgraced former NFL quarterback and convicted dogfight impresario Michael Vick comes up more than once in the book). Throughout all of this, Brian is never likable, and the narrative tone surrounding him—that in the final analysis, what he did to Boo Boo doesn’t really warrant all the subsequent fuss, and that the extent of that ruckus is the novel’s comic heart—will leave no readers doubting where they stand. Dog lovers who don’t find the subject at all funny, particularly when the work’s broader narrative never condemns the crime, might not stick around to follow Brian’s adventures. Other readers will doubtless appreciate the quippy dark humor Stetz deploys effectively alongside some more serious insights into human nature. “I was hurting,” Brian thinks at one point. “You do weird things when you hurt. You look to ease the pain.” None of these insights will bridge the divide for readers who consider Brian irredeemable, but for others, this dark farce will provide amusement.
An intriguing, polarizing tale about a man facing a new life after doing the unforgivable.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2025
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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