A harrowing and lyrical debut about the costs of healing multigenerational trauma.
Multigenerational novel about the gifted women of a Native American family near the shores of a blackwater river in South Carolina.
One night in March 1996, 14-year-old Nadine discovers that her 6-year-old sister, Laurel, is missing from the Wisconsin home they share with their mother, Ayita, and great-aunt Rosebud. The search for Laurel stirs up trouble from the past, including her often violent father, who left before Ayita knew about her second pregnancy and who is initially accused of kidnapping Laurel. It also begins Nadine’s discovery of the powerful inheritance she had dismissed as superstition: the traditional healing ways and visionary gifts of her people that go back centuries. Nadine’s disconnection from her legacy began long before her birth, when her grandmother obeyed her own father’s command to “stay godly” and avoid “the medicine, the witchery.” The novel is intricately structured, following two timelines through its first half, one beginning with the loss of Laurel and the other beginning in 1899, with an encounter between Nadine’s great-great-grandmother Sophronia and the ucv’kse, or Little People, who have the “real medicine” and exist in the “in-between,” between life and death. The two timelines converge when Nadine goes with Rosebud back to South Carolina to connect with her other great-aunt and great-grandmother and learn the healing arts they hope will restore Laurel to them. The resolution of this turbulent, slowly paced, and lyrical debut novel is unsettling, suggesting that though restoration is possible, it may not be in this world.
A harrowing and lyrical debut about the costs of healing multigenerational trauma.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780593830895
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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