An engaging and humorous historical approach to contemporary racism.
In this novel, two medieval scholars are asked to spy on their professor—who may have nefarious ties to a White supremacist group.
When Molly Isaacson first talks to Quinton Quick—they are both studying medieval history at Yale—the exchange doesn’t go so well. Molly unabashedly expresses her astonishment over Quinton’s race: “You’re a medievalist? But you’re Black!” Despite the rocky start, they quickly become good friends, both students under the intellectually impressive and controversial professor Abe Kantorowicz, who has garnered a reputation for breaking bread with Nazis and fascists, if only to criticize them. Molly and Quinton are suddenly approached by a humorously mysterious figure—despite the gravity of the story’s themes, Adamo often shoots for lightsome, if glib, comedy—FBI agent Nathaniel Mapp. With a “conspiratorial air,” Mapp asks the two students to surveil Kantorowicz, who he believes is working furtively with a White supremacist group. The author makes it tantalizingly unclear if Mapp’s suspicions are correct. Shortly after, Kantorowicz asks Molly and Quinton to assist him with an “archaeological experiment” to find a symbol that replaces the swastika as a unifying symbol of bigoted groups, a supposedly academic exercise in historical lucidity. Adamo intelligently combines the topical and the esoteric—at the heart of the novel is the alt-right’s appropriation of medieval symbols to brand their hateful cause. But this virtue doubles as a vice—the book flirts with an excessive academicism. Part of it reads like a classroom lecture while other sections are in fact precisely that. In addition, the author can’t resist drawing some facile and didactic conclusions about the nature of racism. Nevertheless, the story is refreshingly eccentric, and while it sometimes seems in danger of taking itself too seriously, the author’s comic impulses chasten that urge. This is an engrossing tale, a delightfully peculiar blend of intellectual and criminal investigation.
An engaging and humorous historical approach to contemporary racism.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Split Infinitive Books
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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