by Richard Butner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 8, 2022
Clever, high-concept stories that sometimes lack in the telling.
An assortment of speculative short stories filled with ghosts, time leaps, and alternate realities.
Butner has a knack for a quirky, eye-catching premise. “Holderhaven” turns on the discovery of a hidden staircase in a historic manor. “Horses Blow Up Dog City” imagines a dystopian future in which a puppeteer becomes a pop-culture celebrity. In “Give Up,” a man attempts to summit Mount Everest via a virtual reality, while the narrator of “Delta Function” finds himself witnessing the New Wave band he played in back in college. The stories’ arch tone, offbeat scenarios, and folkloric elements bear a resemblance to George Saunders' and Carmen Maria Machado's work, though Butner has his own thematic obsessions. Earnest but frustrated struggles to recover the past is a big one, not just in time-travel yarns like “Delta Function,” but “The Master Key,” in which two friends return to their high school, or the opening “Adventure,” in which a reunion of two friends becomes oddly upended by the appearance of a man in a jester suit. In his best stories, Butner effectively merges the strange setups with a bracing mix of humor and dread. “The Ornithopter,” for instance, takes place in an office whose staff has been rapidly whittled down to a handful of people, one of whom is a hardcore Star Trek geek. (“The metaphor they’re working inside of might be the Nostromo, the spaceship from Alien, not the USS Enterprise,” the hero notes.) And “Give Up” conjures the horrifying sense that a glitchy fake Everest might be as challenging as the real thing. But too often, these stories don’t rise to their promise, occluded with plot or dense prose that smothers the wit and insight Butner strives to bring to them.
Clever, high-concept stories that sometimes lack in the telling.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61873-194-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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by Tana French ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2024
An absorbing crime yarn.
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New York Times Bestseller
A divorced American detective tries to blend into rural Ireland in this sequel to The Searcher (2020).
In fictional Ardnakelty, on Ireland’s west coast, lives retired American cop Cal Hooper, who busies himself repairing furniture with 15-year-old Theresa “Trey” Reddy and fervently wishes to be boring. Then into town pops Trey’s long-gone, good-for-nothing dad, Johnny, all smiles and charm. Much to her distaste, he says he wants to reclaim his fatherly role. In fact, he’s on the run from a criminal for a debt he can’t repay, and he has a cockamamie scheme to persuade local townsfolk that there might be gold in the nearby mountain with a vein that might run through some of their properties. (What, no leprechauns?) “It’s not sheep shite you’ll be smelling in a few months’ time, man,” he tells a farmer. “It’s champagne and caviar.” Some people have fun fantasizing about sudden riches, but they know better. Johnny’s pursuer, Cillian Rushborough, comes to town, and Johnny tries to convince him he could get rich by purchasing people’s land. Alas, someone bashes Rushborough’s brains in, and now there’s a murder mystery. The plot is a bit of a stretch, but the characters and their relationships work well. Trey detests Johnny for not being in her life, and now that he’s back, she neither wants nor needs him. She gets on much better with Cal. Still, she’s a testy teenager when she thinks someone is not treating her like an adult. Cal is aware of this, and he’s careful how he talks to her. Johnny, not so much: “I swear to fuck, women are only put on this earth to wreck our fuckin’ heads,” he whines about Trey’s mother, briefly forgetting he’s talking to Trey. The book abounds in local color and lively dialogue.
An absorbing crime yarn.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780593493434
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
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New York Times Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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