A young couple falls in love in 21st-century New York City: Is it fate, or was their connection foretold by their ancestors?
We are the sum of the people who made us, Caribbean American writer Yanique tells us in her new novel. Their hopes and dreams may bear no resemblance to our own, may in fact be directly opposed to what we want and need, but their stories are the foundations from which we blossom. The idea isn’t new, but the gifted Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning (2014), shapes it into something unique and memorable as she considers the effects of cultural disconnection on desire and love. At the heart of her story are Fly and Stela, who will meet in New York City on the cusp of a pandemic. He’s a Black American, raised on religion and weed, with a mentally ill father and an ear for music; she’s half an orphan from the Virgin Islands with an artist’s eye who loves the colors of the sea and dreams of landing in the belly of a whale. A long and compelling road leads to their love story, one lined with mistakes, regrets, and other emotional flotsam. Potential menace lies everywhere, in a preacher who peddles a peculiar brand of salvation from a parking lot; a predator who slyly hides bad intentions; police officers whose racism and careless sense of justice are tangible dangers. What, then, is Yanique’s “monster in the middle”? She scatters clues with allusions to myth and magic, but interpretation lies with the reader. This author understands how we come to be who we are. “We all know it takes a village to raise a child. But I can tell you honestly that it takes an ancestry to make a man or woman,” says Stela’s stepfather. Look to your roots, Yanique urges us, and maybe you’ll see the outline of your future.
A rich and honest examination of family histories, cultural disconnection, and the way people fall in love.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59463-360-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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Newly released from a work farm in 1950s Kansas, where he served 18 months for involuntary manslaughter, 18-year-old Emmett Watson hits the road with his little brother, Billy, following the death of their father and the foreclosure of their Nebraska farm.
They leave to escape angry townspeople who believe Emmett got off easy, having caused the fatal fall of a taunting local boy by punching him in the nose. The whip-smart Billy, who exhibits OCD–like symptoms, convinces Emmett to drive them to San Francisco to reunite with their mother, who left town eight years ago. He insists she's there, based on postcards she sent before completely disappearing from their lives. But when Emmett's prized red Studebaker is "borrowed" by two rambunctious, New York–bound escapees from the juvie facility he just left, Emmett takes after them via freight train with Billy in tow. Billy befriends a Black veteran named Ulysses who's been riding the rails nonstop since returning home from World War II to find his wife and baby boy gone. A modern picaresque with a host of characters, competing points of view, wandering narratives, and teasing chapter endings, Towles' third novel is even more entertaining than his much-acclaimed A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). You can quibble with one or two plot turns, but there's no resisting moments such as Billy's encounter, high up in the Empire State Building in the middle of the night, with professor Abacus Abernathe, whose Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers he's read 24 times. A remarkable blend of sweetness and doom, Towles' novel is packed with revelations about the American myth, the art of storytelling, and the unrelenting pull of history.
An exhilarating ride through Americana.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-73-522235-9
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
As the pieces of this magical literary puzzle snap together, a flicker of hope is sparked for our benighted world.
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An ancient Greek manuscript connects humanity's past, present, and future.
“Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you” wrote Antonius Diogenes at the end of the first century C.E.—and millennia later, Pulitzer Prize winner Doerr is his fitting heir. Around Diogenes' manuscript, "Cloud Cuckoo Land"—the author did exist, but the text is invented—Doerr builds a community of readers and nature lovers that transcends the boundaries of time and space. The protagonist of the original story is Aethon, a shepherd whose dream of escaping to a paradise in the sky leads to a wild series of adventures in the bodies of beast, fish, and fowl. Aethon's story is first found by Anna in 15th-century Constantinople; though a failure as an apprentice seamstress, she's learned ancient Greek from an elderly scholar. Omeir, a country boy of the same period, is rejected by the world for his cleft lip—but forms the deepest of connections with his beautiful oxen, Moonlight and Tree. In the 1950s, Zeno Ninis, a troubled ex–GI in Lakeport, Idaho, finds peace in working on a translation of Diogenes' recently recovered manuscript. In 2020, 86-year-old Zeno helps a group of youngsters put the story on as a play at the Lakeport Public Library—unaware that an eco-terrorist is planting a bomb in the building during dress rehearsal. (This happens in the first pages of the book and continues ticking away throughout.) On a spaceship called the Argos bound for Beta Oph2 in Mission Year 65, a teenage girl named Konstance is sequestered in a sealed room with a computer named Sybil. How could she possibly encounter Zeno's translation? This is just one of the many narrative miracles worked by the author as he brings a first-century story to its conclusion in 2146.
As the pieces of this magical literary puzzle snap together, a flicker of hope is sparked for our benighted world.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982168-43-8
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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