Guskin’s debut novel tells a sentimental story with a murder mystery at its core, and it's interesting even if you don’t go...
A single mom confronts the possibility that her troubled 4-year-old is the reincarnated spirit of a murdered child.
Thirty-nine-year-old Janie Zimmerman becomes pregnant after an interlude with a stranger while on vacation in Trinidad. Four years later, her son, Noah, is kicked out of preschool because he’s talking about guns, drowning, and the scary parts of the Harry Potter books. He constantly asks Janie if he can go home now and if his other mother is coming soon; he absolutely refuses to take a bath. Attempts to address this situation by visiting psychiatrists and specialists result only in draining Janie’s savings and in a tentative diagnosis of early-onset schizophrenia. In her desperation, she gets out a bottle of bourbon and Googles the words “help” and “another life.” She ends up watching a documentary featuring Dr. Jerome Anderson, "who for many decades has been studying young children who seem to recall details from previous lives.” But Anderson is having troubles of his own. Still staggering from the death of his wife one year earlier, he's been diagnosed with aphasia, a form of dementia that involves the gradual loss of language. Though his work has been jeered at by the scientific community, he's now written a book for the general public which has been accepted for publication by “one of the top editors in the field,” who requires only that he add one more compelling case history. His phone call from Janie Zimmerman will provide that opportunity, but will his mental faculties hold out long enough for the threesome to solve the mystery of Noah’s past? The novel includes many excerpts from a real book called Life Before Life: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives by Jim Tucker—these describe real-life cases of apparently transferred memories.
Guskin’s debut novel tells a sentimental story with a murder mystery at its core, and it's interesting even if you don’t go for the premise.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07642-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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.
