A lyrical mystery that embraces letting go and living freely.
Ghosts with untold stories and guests with long-buried secrets reside in Mallow Island’s mysterious Dellawisp condos.
Made famous by Roscoe Avanger’s legendary novel Sweet Mallow, quaint Mallow Island, South Carolina, proves a welcome respite for Zoey Hennessey. With her inattentive father and stepmother’s eagerness to convert her bedroom into a crafting oasis, the 18-year-old decided to leave her home in Tulsa to spend the summer before college at her late mother’s old studio on the island. She hopes that the condo, located at the horseshoe-shaped Dellawisp complex, will unearth memories of Paloma, who died 12 years ago in a car accident. Joining Zoey is her imaginary bird, Pigeon, and when they arrive, Zoey is disappointed to discover few traces of her mother…though her new environment proves anything but lonely. Maintained by the elderly Frasier, who is constantly tailed by turquoise dellawisp birds, the condos house a hodgepodge of colorful neighbors, including the burly redheaded chef Mac; the guarded, henna-covered artist Charlotte; the paper-hoarding busybody Lizbeth and her chain-smoking recluse sister, Lucy. When Lizbeth unexpectedly dies the first night of Zoey’s stay, Frasier asks Zoey to clean out her neighbor’s cluttered home. With Charlotte’s help, Zoey is determined to understand the secrets of this eccentric woman, but she soon realizes that Lizbeth may not be the only Dellawisp resident haunted by the past. Allen weaves together an intriguing mystery, following each resident of Dellawisp as they navigate loss and love and uncover what is true and what is real. Charlotte’s story in particular stands out; once beholden to her parents’ religious cult, she hesitates to trust Zoey’s innocence and Mac’s selflessness. Allen breathes life into her characters, those living and those in between, and fashions a narrative that imparts a powerful belief in everlasting memory: “Stories aren’t fiction. Stories are fabric. They’re the white sheets we drape over our ghosts so we can see them.”
A lyrical mystery that embraces letting go and living freely.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2500-1986-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.
Four kids who swore an oath of friendship reunite as adults to face their fears.
The foundation of this novel is a consciously employed trope about messed-up kids, from the Losers Club in Stephen King’s It (1986) to more recent groupings of youth gone wrong in everything from Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids (2017) to Gerard Way’s The Umbrella Academy comic-book series. Here, it’s five kids from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, circa 1998: charismatic Matty, cynical Nick, carefree Hamish, cool-ahead-of-her-time Lore-née-Lauren, and nervous nail-biter Owen. Each burdened with terrible families, they create a pact, the Covenant: “It’s how they’re there for each other. How they’ll do anything for each other. Get revenge. Take a beating. Do what needs doing.” But when they discover the titular staircase during a camping trip and their impulsive leader Matty disappears while climbing it, the band breaks up. Decades later, Lore is a successful game designer, having abandoned Owen to his anxieties, while Hamish has become a family man and Nick is dying of pancreatic cancer. When he invokes their pact, the surviving members reassemble at a similar anomaly in the woods to make sense of it all. Climbing another staircase into a liminal space marked with signs saying “This place hates you,” among other things, our not-so-merry band suddenly finds themselves trapped in a haunted house. There’s plenty of catnip for horror fans as these former kids work their way through shifting set pieces—rooms where children were tortured, murdered, and worse, including some tailored specifically to them—but the adversary ultimately leaves something to be desired. The book isn’t as overtly gothic as Black River Orchard (2023) or as propulsive as his techno-thrillers, but Wendig has interesting things to say about friendship and childhood trauma and its reverberations. Lore gets it, near the end: “We’re all really fucked up and just trying to get through life, and it’s better when we do it together instead of alone.”
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593156568
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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