Anyone who’s hit rock bottom can still get a shot at redemption if they’re willing to do what it takes.
Helping a sick horse gives a washed-up musician in his 60s a chance to make peace with his past.
“Please,” whispers Al Ward, “please give me the strength to pull the trigger and let it be over.” Al isn’t contemplating suicide. An old horse has wandered into the abandoned Nevada mining camp that Al calls home, and he wants to put it out of its misery. The camp belonged to his late great-uncle Mel, who mined it for years with no success. Al would stay there and dry out whenever the excesses of life as a journeyman guitarist and songwriter became too much. But now the horse, scarred and bleeding from a coyote bite, intrudes on the camp, where Al has been holed up and hiding from his demons. The horse doesn’t do anything to provoke him. It just stands there in the snow, right outside the assayer’s office where Al sleeps, eats, thinks, and still writes songs by lantern light. When Al decides to show mercy and points his old .357 at the animal, he tearfully realizes that he can’t kill the poor beast “because he felt that he and the horse were the same.” It’s a familiar, oft-told story of someone unexpectedly finding healing in the presence of an animal, but Vlautin makes that trope his own. His writing style is spare, restrained, unsentimental, yet full of emotion and force. A songwriter and band frontman, Vlautin understands the ups and downs of a touring musician’s life, and his experiences inform Al’s long career playing casinos from Las Vegas to Reno to Tahoe and beyond. Al has a gift for songwriting, and plenty of tortured musicians—including heartbreaker Mona and the self-destructive Sanchez Brothers—clamored after him to write hits for them. Al never wished for much in life, only, as he says of the horse, to “be all right and live an all right life.” He’s managed to have plenty of all right moments, especially during his short-lived marriage to his true love, Maxine. Helping the horse might give him a chance to have another one. After Al makes a long trek to get help, a friend teases him that what he’s done “says something. Most people wouldn’t cross the street to do something decent, and you walked thirty miles in the snow, and you’re a drunk, lazy musician.” But Al’s risky walk shows he’s more than that; he’s still full of surprises.
Anyone who’s hit rock bottom can still get a shot at redemption if they’re willing to do what it takes.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780063346574
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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