A luminous tale of friendship; readers will be excited to travel with these complex characters.
A novel explores whether a road trip across America with a gay friend will put a troubled woman’s life back together.
Glenna Daniels’ life is a big mess. Three times married and with a third divorce pending, she has a miscarriage after trying hard to get pregnant. Then her father—and what a piece of work he is—accidentally burns her house down and perishes in the fire. Desperate, she gets in touch with her old friend Carey, a gay history professor. She is in Eastern Tennessee; he is in Atlanta. They met in the third grade and became fast friends and allies. Off they go on a road trip to the West Coast and back. Carey is carrying his own grief: His husband, Stan, died a couple of years ago. What follows is a travelogue (Yosemite, Yellowstone, Canyon de Chelly, the Gateway Arch) with wide-ranging commentary. They visit gay friends of Carey’s in San Francisco. Along the way, Glenna tortures herself with the secret of the miscarriage, which she finally confesses to Carey, allowing her healing to begin. Glenna and Carey start searching for happiness, and the details of their journey are both intriguing and believable. Underwood is a first-rate writer with a collection of poetry, The Book of Awe (2018), to her credit. One mark of a superb novelist is a dogged digging into characters and events, seeing things from all sides. In short, she is thoughtful and not afraid to spend four or five pages on an important scene, which she does time and again. And she gives readers arresting phrases, such as “the brain’s hot little terrarium of regret” and “Carey pushed out of the tent like a hatchling.” In fact, she has a poet’s love for words and the grounding of a moralist without being oppressively moralistic. The audience will find Glenna and Carey immensely appealing and will be convinced that they will remain lifelong pals.
A luminous tale of friendship; readers will be excited to travel with these complex characters.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-948692-84-7
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Madville Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A perfectly charming read for devotees of the written word and anyone who’s ever hoped to find love in a bookstore.
An anonymous note left in a used book creates a surprising love triangle in Seattle.
April knows she’s become a bit too isolated while working remotely for an online real estate company. Her only social interactions come from awkward blind dates and apologetic texts from busy friends who have left her behind. Perhaps it’s this loneliness that causes her to take drastic, romantic action. She leaves an anonymous note in a book she sells to local bookstore Read the Room—it’s meant for the eyes of the cute flannel-wearing man who works at the used-book counter. But that cute employee, Westley, doesn’t see the note before putting the book—Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz—on the shelf. Instead, it’s found by widowed mother Laura, who thinks it’s Westley’s way of covertly communicating with her, and she responds by leaving a note in a copy of The Hunger Games, as April instructed in her original letter. Westley, meanwhile, has no idea why women are staring at him from the young adult section—he’s focused on a movie that’s filming at Read the Room. As April and Laura unwittingly leave each other letters, the many characters in the bookstore’s orbit get to know each other and unlikely connections form. In her debut novel, Seattle Times arts critic Macdonald writes her own love letter to bookstores, and the community and comfort they can provide. The writing has the feel of a British rom-com, despite the Seattle setting, which gives the story a cozy air. Although there are romances brewing, the story is ultimately about the courage it takes to go after the life you want.
A perfectly charming read for devotees of the written word and anyone who’s ever hoped to find love in a bookstore.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851296
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 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.
