An ambitious social novel that struggles to fold in its protagonist’s personal travails.
A woman fights for racial justice and female ordination in Hilsabeck’s debut novel.
Lily Vida Wallace, who’s White, grew up in Greenville, Texas, where threats of violence against Black people were commonplace. In the early 1970s, the adult Lily moves to New York City to work with the Episcopal Church, whose members are known for assisting Freedom Riders and others working for the civil rights movement. In 1973, Sam Jefferson, a Black church sexton, is murdered in South Carolina, and Lily travels there on behalf of the presiding bishop to attend the man’s funeral, and she stares Southern racism in the face for the first time in years: “This whole history of violence,” she fumes. “It’s like exploding shrapnel. The pain has to be lodged in every American whether they realize it or not. How can life just go on when something like this happens?” The trip jump-starts Lily’s personal reckoning, which involves an engagement to a man that falls apart spectacularly; a new relationship with Rodney Davis, a Black lawyer and the brother of one of her co-workers; and her desire to break the tradition of exclusively male Episcopal priests. However, even as history marches on into the 1980s and ’90s, Lily and Rodney find out that familiar threats of violence remain. Over the course of this historical novel, Hilsabeck’s prose is vivid and urgent, as when Lily first arrives back in South Carolina and has a visceral reaction to those who surround her at the Episcopal church: “Looking around the nave at faces familiar as a family reunion, Lily panicked, as disjunction gave way to kinship, and disengagement to complicity.” The plot is slow-paced, although it effectively leads up to a truly shocking final act. Lily’s story of self-actualization feels uncomfortably shoehorned into the overarching narrative of racist violence. However, Hilsabeck does succeed at dramatizing the relationship between religion and activism in a particular era as well as the tensions surrounding the ordination of Episcopal priests.
An ambitious social novel that struggles to fold in its protagonist’s personal travails.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-077-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2021
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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