An imaginative but ultimately disappointing set of tales.
Budman’s collection of short stories offers an occasionally surreal examination of immigration to America with an emphasis on Russian newcomers.
In his debut novel, My Life at First Try (2008), the author looked at life in the United States and Soviet Russia using flash-fiction narratives. His latest collection of 21 tales also observes the American dream through a varied cast of immigrant characters. The opening work, “A Perfect Rhyme Translated From Scratch,” is about a Chinese restaurant server living in a predominantly White hamlet in northern Pennsylvania. Her manager, a wannabe poet who’s separated from his wife, becomes infatuated with her despite the fact she pays him little attention. This is followed by “The Selfless Quarantine,” an eerie vision of a country brought to its knees by a deadly pandemic. In “American Zolushka,” a 20-something Russian woman is intent on applying to a mail-order bride agency, hoping to escape to a “clean and Technicolor” America. This Zolushka (or Cinderella) character reappears in “Five Minutes After Midnight,” now divorced, living in New York state, and involved with the Greek god Morpheus. Such bizarre couplings aren’t unusual in Budman’s writing; in “The Titan. An Office Romance,” for instance, a pre-Olympian god develops a crush on a girl working in the adjacent office cubicle, and in “Super Couple,” Soupmann—Superman’s third cousin, twice removed—falls for Saltwoman. Things get stranger still in the closing story, “Cinderella’s Sister or the Bridge to Nowhere,” in which an old man dies following dental bridgework and decides to phone his dentist from beyond the grave.
The author’s previous set of tales was sardonically amusing, and there’s a scattering of laugh-out-loud moments in this second book. For instance, at one point, a narrator wryly outlines Soupmann’s priorities as a superhero: “He fights for truth and justice, and sometimes for truth and the American way, and sometimes for justice and the American way, but not for all three at once. Otherwise, he’d be stretching too thin.” The author also produces some tremendously witty similes at times; regarding the elderly gentleman’s dentistry, the narrator remarks: “The old man’s mouth feels like the international space station: half of the teeth American and half Russian.” On other occasions, his writing is quite thought-provoking: “Everyone knows that reality is just a poor immigrant next to a dream of a newly minted native.” However, the tales include occasional moments of clipped, grammatically awkward phrasing: “Few minutes later, she was crying on his shoulder. He forgot when the last time a woman did that was.” Soviet-born Budman focuses mainly on the Russian immigrant experience, which he keenly observes. However, it’s disappointing that the stories here largely overlook immigrants of other nationalities. The nameless, underdeveloped Chinese server, for instance, merely becomes a blank canvas upon which her manager can project his skewed fantasies of exoticism: “He imagines her sitting in the lotus position…needles dotting her back.” The end product is, as a result, a somewhat culturally narrow study.
An imaginative but ultimately disappointing set of tales.Pub Date: July 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60-489289-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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