An emotionally honest love story featuring a tragic history and a new beginning.
On the precipice of old age, a gay man faces a new relationship and reflects upon his past in Meis’ novel.
After Nathan Landis loses his husband, Anthony, he wanders his San Francisco neighborhood clad in dirty sweatpants. While recalling a sad memory of his years in Spain, he encounters a man in scrubs named Mateo, who wonders if he’s OK. Nathan is attracted to the younger man and pursues a connection. As the relationship between Nathan and Mateo unfolds, Nathan reflects upon his life. As a college student, Nathan returned home from Tulane to declare to his parents that he was gay, recovering from drug addiction, and a college dropout. After he left school and worked at a restaurant, he and his first partner, Nick—a doctor involved in a scandal and some years Nathan’s senior—went to Montreal to visit Nathan’s brother, David. Following a return to Louisiana, Nathan began using cocaine and sleeping around. Nathan and Nick then moved to San Francisco and lived a life that they loved. Following the tragic assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, the two moved to Spain, where Nick contracted AIDS. After Nick’s death, their manipulative friend, Vladimir, loved and cared for Nathan and brought him home to the States. Nathan then traveled and met Anthony, beginning a new chapter in his life (“moving to San Leandro with him felt like the final rejection of the surroundings, circumstances, and unstable people that led me to drugs”). In this romantic and engaging novel, Meis presents an authentic story of an older man reflecting upon his past and facing an uncertain future. Emotionally resonant, the narrative explores the harsh reality of being gay during cultural upheaval and the AIDS epidemic. The story also spotlights the universal pain of being displaced and having to begin again. Although some past events are “told” rather than “shown” to readers, this novel is an affecting portrait of one man’s late quest for love and fulfillment.
An emotionally honest love story featuring a tragic history and a new beginning.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 978-1915905338
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Spectrum Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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