An intriguing but slow-moving emotional drama.
In this novel, a young woman wrestles with the death of her older brother and gets lost in a shapeless ennui.
Eleanor Lihte encounters tragedy as a young girl—her older brother, Jamie, dies in a car accident when he is only 18 years old. As a result, her own life becomes entrapped in a state of permanent shiftlessness—she is overcome by boredom and an aching loneliness. Her family manages the tragedy through a studied silence and, in the case of her mother, a cruel incomprehension and lack of empathy for Eleanor’s own suffering: “You’ve always been such a sweet girl. I don’t understand why things have been so hard for you.” When Eleanor is not working as a lifeguard, an uninspiring job—she and her peers are “more like seminude janitors than heroes”—she spends her time sewing and crying. She finally musters enough energy to move from California to Arizona in order to study to become a teacher, but she continues to find the purpose of existence bewildering and to feel that her life is a failure. Nevertheless, Eleanor is reluctant to return to her “tiny homeland, the world of limited possibilities she knew,” and seeks out counsel from various figures, including a born-again spiritual guru, a psychic, and, finally, a therapist.
Toy intelligently conveys Eleanor’s emotional desolation and her benumbed inability to feel pleasure. But the author’s writing sometimes strains too laboriously for lyrical heights and instead achieves a curious eccentricity: “One Sunday sitting at her roommate’s kitchen table waiting for her mother to call,” Eleanor “read a book about evolution. She was hoping to evolve—to become a scaled amphibian heading back toward the water or a bright yellow duck.” The plot is as sluggish as the protagonist—not much happens, which of course makes sense given the morbid torpor that infects Eleanor. Toy’s prose deftly captures her languor—it even parallels it—but the result is sometimes closer to a portrait of melancholy than an engaging story. Still, readers will empathize with Eleanor as she deals with a soporific lethargy. Yet sometimes that tedium is broken with gibberish. Consider this excerpt from a letter Eleanor writes to a former teacher: “I am writing not only to apologize, but to offer you the combination that will unleash the ringing sound inside my telephone. You forgot, I am sure, to ask for it. You are forgetting also, I am sure, to ask when I am coming to visit. Unfortunately, I am tied to my supply of French fries and white bread and will not be coming soon.” Eleanor finally begins to recover from her lassitude, partly as a result of therapy, and comes to grip with the human condition she previously resisted. Her ultimate revelation, though, seems a bit trite—she finds solace in recognizing that others are far more “dysfunctional” than she is.
An intriguing but slow-moving emotional drama.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-60489-301-4
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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