An enticing premise and promising characters, but in desperate need of focus.
Eco-horror arrives in Baywood, a small coastal California town.
The students of Baywood High are uneasy and irritated. They gripe: “Now, all kinds of adults are pretending to die. Deading. That’s what we call it, have been calling it, because, well, we’ve done it before, like more than a year before the adults ever thought to start their stupid version.” The kids deaded to make a point, but now something eerie is happening with the adults, “something completely unrelated. Something similar. Everywhere in Baywood, people lying on sidewalks and streets.” The chapters pivot among different perspectives to tease out what’s happening. Then an esoteric cult called the Risers appears amid the supernatural chaos to heighten anxieties about the current situation. The characters include Bernhard Vestinos, the owner of an oyster farm; Chango Enriquez, one of his employees; Chango’s teenage brother, Blas, an avid birder; Ingram Evans, an older birder; and Kumi Sato, Ingram’s friend. At a certain point, it’s hard to keep track of all the characters, though Chango and Blas are persistent standouts because of their relatable sibling interactions. The story is told from every possible point of view: Chapters from different third-person perspectives meld with a collective “we” that represents the teens of Baywood. One chapter uses the second person “you,” and several are told in the first person. Scientific information about oysters and birds is fascinating but eventually overtakes the plot. Blas and his fellow students are smart, cleareyed, sardonic, sometimes apathetic in a way that captures adolescence. They’re fed up with the adults’ lack of action in the important matters that caused them to “dead” in the first place: “We did it to make fun of ourselves. We did it because we die and it isn’t fair. You see, we’d already held GUN CONTROL rallies, BLACK LIVES MATTER rallies, EARTH DAY rallies. Those always got us nowhere. Adults don’t listen. We know that.” Admirably, these teen characters continue to place blame where it belongs.
An enticing premise and promising characters, but in desperate need of focus.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781645661290
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Erewhon
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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