An unsparing critique of Brazil’s young elites.
Thirty-something Vivian must confront the uncomfortable fact of her enormous privilege.
Vivian lives in an apartment in Rio de Janeiro, bought by her parents for her 30th birthday, which is decorated with designer furniture and prints from a series showing at the local art museum. She’s a freelance curator, one who can afford to take resume-boosting jobs—when money’s tight, she rents out her apartment and moves back into one of her family’s four properties. In her free time, she goes to raves and snorts cocaine with her friends, all of whom are part of Brazil’s cultural elite. Vivian operates in such a rarified realm that she’s been taught she is upper-middle-class—the true upper echelon, in her eyes, have their own private planes. This self-perception is at once deluded and not inaccurate, creating “a sense of inferiority that is very specific, kind of comic and also kinda sad.” One night, as Vivian and friends are in line for a rave, police attack two street vendors, one of whom usually works on Vivian’s street and from whom she often buys beer. Vivian and her friends flee the violence by entering the rave venue; much later, she learns that the vendor, Darlene, has died from a head wound, presumably inflicted by the police that night. Vivian is not a total stranger to dark and unpleasant feelings—she’s been heavily medicated for mental illness since the age of 10—but this violence, so abrupt and so close in proximity, needles her. But can it shock her out of the cocoon of her own privilege? Drummond’s narrative voice is fiercely honest, coolly cynical, and sharply scathing: “What was I supposed to feel: Grief, guilt, indifference, sadness? It was like I’d entered a new environment whose codes I didn’t properly know, and I was supposed to understand, intuitively, how to behave and act in the moment, based on that understanding.” Vivian is not an especially appealing character; and yet, remarkably, Drummond manages to elicit readers’ empathy for her, mining her most fundamental and human flaws and insecurities.
An unsparing critique of Brazil’s young elites.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780374611286
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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