Overstuffed, but serious readers will appreciate Ozeki’s passionate engagement with important ideas.
A boy who hears objects talking and his mother, who can’t stop hoarding things, work out their destinies in a meditative tribute to books, libraries, and Zen wisdom.
Everything starts going awry for Benny Oh the year he turns 12, “the same year his father died and his mother started putting on weight.” It’s not just pounds that Annabelle adds; she obsessively accumulates things—kitchenware, snow globes, it doesn’t really matter what—to fill the void left by her husband’s death. Meanwhile, the voices Benny hears in everything from coffee cups to windowpanes become so insistent that he unwisely reveals his unwelcome ability at school and winds up in a pediatric psychiatry ward. There he meets a girl called The Aleph, whose enigmatic notes lead him post-hospital to the local library and a quest for meaning directed by The Aleph and a homeless hobo who was “a super famous poet back in Slovenia.” As she did in A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Ozeki counterpoints faultless contemporary teenspeak with an adult third-person voice—in this case, intriguingly, the voice of Benny’s Book. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine,” Benny tells the Book, and their interaction drives the story. The Book connects Annabelle’s hoarding to the looming ecological catastrophe slowly being triggered by human beings’ carelessness and waste; the voices Benny hears, it suggests, are calls to recognize our kinship with the other beings on our planet. Annabelle is getting a similar message from a book that jumps into her shopping cart: Tidy Magic, “written by a real Zen monk.” Ozeki’s insertion of Zen teachings into the narrative is slightly contrived, but she underscores the urgency of her spiritual message by ratcheting up the physical-world tension for her characters, as Annabelle’s stockpiling puts her at risk of being evicted from her home and having Benny placed in foster care. Benny’s final assertion of agency provides a moving, albeit hasty, wrap-up for a novel that staggers somewhat under the weight of everything the author wants to say.
Overstuffed, but serious readers will appreciate Ozeki’s passionate engagement with important ideas.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-39-956364-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 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.
