A sometimes-confusing but compelling story of loyalty and personal decision-making.
Zeus orders Apollo to live with a mortal prince, Hyacinth, for a year to teach him a lesson on how to be a good deity, but things don’t turn out as expected in Bailey’s fantasy series starter.
Apollo’s mortal sister, Temi, has been protected so that no god can kill or hurt her. However, Zeus isn’t beneath using her as a negotiating chip against Apollo to ensure that the latter eventually takes up his godly responsibilities. Apollo agrees to spend a year with Hyacinth, a mortal prince who “knows how to obey his father and take up the mantle of leadership.” Unfortunately, Apollo doesn’t have fond memories of past times with Hyacinth and dwells on how “every time I did something my father disapproved of, Hyacinth would be there, and he would act perfectly, showing me up.” Hyacinth also has unpleasant recollections of Apollo since, in their last interaction, Apollo acted like a “selfish bastard.” But when Apollo and Hyacinth are forced to spend more time together, they start to realize that there might be more to each other than they initially thought. Readers may find some aspects of this novel to be a bit hard to grasp; for example, there are multiple references to “decade dedications,” which are never clearly defined, and neither is the ascension that the currently human Apollo needs to go through to become a deity. Nonetheless, Bailey creates solid characters with relatable problems, which makes the plot consistently engaging. Although Hyacinth is a prince and Apollo is a soon-to-be-god, they both struggle with making “correct” decisions and with the idea of putting themselves first—both of which are very human problems. Similarly, Epiphany, Hyacinth’s sister, is effectively shown to have difficulty deciding between love and family responsibility, and Temi must come to terms with inevitably losing her brother.
A sometimes-confusing but compelling story of loyalty and personal decision-making.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Taut, funny, and poignant; a tremendous debut.
A young single mother with a carefully guarded past reluctantly chaperones a school trip across California at the behest of her determined and curious daughter.
In 1989, 18-year-old Szonja Imre arrives in Los Angeles from Hungary to spend the summer with her married sister. In 2001, Sonia Imre dodges nosy PTA parents curious about a single mother with an unspecified background and a cagey demeanor. The how and why of this transformation is slowly revealed across both timelines, with excursions back and forth and in between, to Budapest, D.C., and California suburbia. When Szonja first arrives in Los Angeles, she’s surprised and a little disappointed by the rigidly structured life her once-close elder sister, Rina, has built. Now married to an Orthodox Jewish man, adult Rina has fully embraced the Jewish faith she and Szonja were raised to quietly ignore by their parents, both assiduously assimilated children of the Holocaust. As tension between the sisters grows, Szonja finds new connection with a boy from the Hebrew class she reluctantly attends each week. In the new millennium, Sonia’s daughter Mila has a plan: a parent-trap under the cover of a school orchestra trip to force her secretive mother to finally introduce her to the man who, she is certain, must be her father. But for Sonia, the trip is a series of minefields as she seeks to protect herself and her daughter from the fact of her less-than-legal status in America. Sonia/Szonja is a deliciously vivid character, her wry perspective revealing a character as spiky and vulnerable as the novel’s title suggests. Fabriczki’s prose dances lightly in a brisk, knowing, slightly aloof third-person present-tense voice perfectly tuned to its main character. Emotions slam in from the side, grief and alienation and the slow-dawning realization that “life unspools, one decision at a time cutting out entire alternative worlds, an endless series of bifurcations nudging each person into a life they have no way of knowing they will like or not.”
Taut, funny, and poignant; a tremendous debut.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781668091913
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 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.
