An elegant novel about the ways pain can shape a man’s personality.
In Walsh’s debut novel, a Connecticut man survives the hell of war only to lead a lonely peacetime existence back home.
Joe DaSilva grows up in a small town on the banks of the Connecticut River, the son of a Portuguese waterman. He spends his childhood learning to tie knots from his father, getting into trouble with his best friend Bill Crawley, and pining after his childhood crush, Peggy. The week before high school graduation, Joe proposes to Peggy only to be rejected. The brokenhearted Joe quickly enlists in the Navy—there’s a war coming, after all—despite the reservations of his parents. With Bill in tow, Joe sails for Manila just in time to get attacked by the Japanese military (a wounded Bill is shipped to Australia before the coming Japanese invasion, but Joe stays behind and is captured when the Philippines fall). He somehow survives the Bataan Death March, a prison camp, malaria, and dysentery, but when he makes it back to Connecticut at war’s end, he’s a shell of his former self. Even worse, he learns that Peggy and Bill have become engaged in his absence. Resentful of his closest friends and wracked by post-traumatic stress, Joe settles into a stoic life as a mechanic. For the next 40 years, he’s content to repress his memories of the war—and all of his other grievances—until a new waitress takes a job at one of the local restaurants. Leigh Ann and her young daughter, Shelly, are new in town. Shelly spends her days alone at a vacant hotel while Leigh Ann works her shift, and Joe takes it upon himself to keep an eye on the child. As Joe inserts himself into their lives, he can’t help but allow them into his own. In the process, he’s finally forced to deal with the many ghosts of his past.
The author is a skilled storyteller with a knack for bringing scenes to vivid life, whether they depict a bucolic afternoon spent fishing on the river or a terrifying moment from the war: “He was barely able to rise to one knee the night the Japanese burst into camp. The first rifle butt to the back of his head folded the hemispheres of his brain in on each other. He lay there on his side, time out of body, eyes recording the scene like a camera knocked to the ground, still rolling.” The novel takes its time getting started, and the early chapters are burdened with an unfortunate sentimentality. From the point the war commences, however, Walsh weaves an immersive narrative that does not let up for the rest of the book. Even when the story treads into familiar territory—older Joe is reminiscent of any number of late-career Clint Eastwood film performances as a grump waiting to have his heart softened—the author is deft enough at characterization and plotting to keep the material from feeling stale. Those looking for a bighearted tale of PTSD and catharsis will find much to love in Joe’s story.
An elegant novel about the ways pain can shape a man’s personality.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781977261120
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2023
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 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: yesterday
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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