Heart-wrenching in its realism, this novel captures the recklessness of young lust and the enduring pain of familial love.
A boy moves with his family from Colombia to the U.S., only to embark on his own journey of self-discovery.
This intense and tender debut novel follows the plight of a young boy, Santiago, as he navigates childhood and young adulthood across two continents, from Colombia to Miami to New York and back again. In Ibagué, Santiago’s father departs for extended stretches, ostensibly working in Tierra Caliente, Mexico. The boy’s mother also disappears, though her whereabouts are less certain, leaving Santiago and his older brother, Manuel, to cope and fend for themselves: “We, the boys, will bathe in the rivers....We will be revolutionaries.” In the novel’s opening section, Sanchez employs the definitive article to impose a jarring distance between “the mother,” “the father,” “the brother,” and “the boy” before pivoting to a more conventional first-person perspective. Eventually, the brothers move with their mother to Miami, and then Santiago strikes out on his own for New York, where he can fully explore his burgeoning queer identity. Part family saga, part coming-of-age story, the novel reckons with issues of abandonment, migration, and gay identity, as Santiago confronts the ripple effects of trauma and separation on his family. When Santiago returns to Colombia to visit, Sanchez pivots point of view again to focus on the mother. Throughout, the author’s close attention to tiny details yields a finely rendered material and emotional landscape, whether it’s a discarded plastic sofa cover, a dress removed by the mother for inspection (like “the hide of an animal, symmetrically filleted”), or postcoital perspiration from one of Santiago’s older partners: “three lines of sweat running down his pecs.” In its depiction of brotherly bonds, Latin American men, and gay sexuality, the novel is comparable to We the Animals by Justin Torres and marks the emergence of an exciting new voice in American fiction.
Heart-wrenching in its realism, this novel captures the recklessness of young lust and the enduring pain of familial love.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780593542187
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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