An enjoyable, if rather leisurely, tale of Traveler life.
A college graduate reunites with his Traveler friends in Gallagher’s sequel to Lowlands (2017).
It’s been seven years since James Ward had any contact with the Dragons, an itinerant group of Travelers with Irish and British roots. He’d initially befriended them as a high schooler in New York City; now out of college, he hears from Vivien Widdershins, the Dragons’ queen. With no job prospects, James heads to Pennsylvania where the Travelers have taken up residence. He makes himself comfortable at their wooded settlement, which he dubs “Dragon Town,” but the person whom he’s most excited to see is at another nearby tribe’s encampment: Cornelia Parsons, who’s around the same age as him and was the first Traveler he met, all those years ago. As days become weeks, James helps with laundry and landscaping but he’s rather lacking at other jobs that require manual labor, such as woodwork and repair. He spends most of his time contemplating his future. He’s sure that his classics degree won’t lead to a viable career, so he seriously considers Vivien’s offer to be the Dragons’ exclusive solicitor. A permanent home with the Travelers wouldn’t be so bad; he has a fondness for their way of life, and others already think of him and Cornelia as an “item.” Before he can make a decision, though, a sudden police raid leads to the shocking deaths of two tribe members. The Dragons are distraught and worried, as there’s a possibility that one of their enemies made a false report of drug activity that led to the raid.
Gallagher delivers a winsome portrayal of Travelers in this second series installment. The Dragons are shown to display a natural kindness and welcome James into their community. Although the story centers on Dragon Town, there are some signs of discrimination from outsiders, despite the fact that Travelers do their best to keep mostly to themselves. However, the story often feels stagnant; James is essentially on vacation, and as a result, there’s minimal action. Readers may find the protagonist’s lackadaisical attitude off-putting; he boasts of a near-full-ride scholarship and being debt free, but he also deems his college major impractical without even bothering to look for work. Still, James at least appreciates his leisure, as aptly expressed in Gallagher’s unadorned prose: “I was always glad for a day’s rain or an afternoon’s downpour, to take the time to doze and listen to the heavy drops. Not to exaggerate; they didn’t work me all that hard. But it wasn’t the life I was used to.” Dragon Town, nevertheless, isn’t completely uneventful before the raid; for example, at one point, an unknown dog storms the property and seemingly targets a 4-year-old boy. In a more comical turn, James joins a Traveler to collect an overdue bill—which, in practice, necessitates stealing something of equal or lesser value. The startling deaths unsurprisingly send the plot in a new direction in later sections, which include time jumps and a clear setup for another installment.
An enjoyable, if rather leisurely, tale of Traveler life.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60489-276-5
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A delightfully nostalgic novel about how the things we loved in the past have the power to shape our future.
A boy band cruise is the site of one woman’s post-divorce healing.
Annie never meant to end up alone on a Boy Talk cruise, but that’s exactly what happens when her sister breaks a leg and has to bow out of their vacation. Now Annie is sharing a cabin with a stranger, stuck on the cruise ship American Fantasy with the 1990s band—and thousands of their biggest fans, known as Talkers. Annie doesn’t consider herself a Talker, even if she was a fan back in the day. But reeling from a recent divorce and dealing with complex feelings about turning 50, Annie throws herself into the distraction of the trip. What she doesn’t expect is to truly connect with the music, the band, the other fans, and herself. As Annie observes, “This was why people turned to religion or watched the Super Bowl at a sports bar instead of alone in their living room. It felt good to be a part of something where your passion was celebrated instead of mocked.” All the Talkers dream of having a special bond with “the guys,” but when Annie actually does meet Keith, a Boy Talk member who’s clearly going through a hard time, she wonders if their connection is real or if she’s just as delusional as the other (mostly) women on the ship. Straub depicts a wonderfully immersive world aboard the American Fantasy, one where each woman assigns herself a favorite guy and everyone is bedecked in Boy Talk merch. For five days, the Talkers live in a fantasy world where the only thing that matters is their connection with a band that meant everything to them so many years ago. As Annie puts it, “Inside her head, which is where she heard the music, it had touched some lever so deep that it couldn’t be reversed…the music was a direct vein to her own childhood, the least complicated part of her life.”
A delightfully nostalgic novel about how the things we loved in the past have the power to shape our future.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798217046850
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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