A bristling, lurching, and often insightful investigation of the past.
Wright’s experimental novel meditates on history and racism in the Deep South.
Welcome to Louisiana. This “Sportsman’s Paradise,” as the state motto has it, is a land with a complicated past, from its slave trade to the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 to its showcasing, and later removal, of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. This fictional journey begins around 2016 in Baton Rouge, the state capital, named after a “red stick” that was once used to demarcate a border. It’s home to a section called Standard Heights, a neighborhood that was once “a company town built for workers by Standard Oil at the turn of the last century.” Many streets in the neighborhood are named after Native American nations—which is odd, given past violence against them by white settlers. Its proximity to what is now a large ExxonMobil plant makes it less-than-prime real estate. It’s also a place that was once home to a man named Toussaint; the pollution was so bad when he was growing up there that his father wouldn’t allow the opening of any windows in the family home. As the narrator, a writer on an unusual quest, converses with Toussaint, the story becomes a personalized tour of Southern injustice. Items for discussion include everything from The Negro Motorist Green Book and lynching postcards to the 2017 Floyd Mayweather-Connor McGregor boxing match. The narrator eventually makes it to New Orleans in time to see the removal of the Lee statue; he reveals that he, himself, is a distant relative to an infamous historical figure. A photo of that man is included, among other images, such as of a crumbling interior of the abandoned Charity Hospital in New Orleans. It all amounts to a collage-like look at America’s troubling past.
Wright’s novel progresses in a concentrated but rather plotless manner in long, dense sentences. The ExxonMobil site in Baton Rouge is described as “a city-state unto itself with its own body of rules and oral traditions maintained by an order of petrochemical priests.” Toussaint speaks of how he “summoned the catawampus courage to overcome the trepidation and the taboo, which had gripped me for years” against opening windows at home. The work abounds with such slow, poetic lines, and their tone works best when guiding readers through lesser-known aspects of the past. For instance, a floodgate system called the Spillway is described, intriguingly enough, as only having been opened 11 times. Yet the work’s unrelenting earnestness can make for some jarring moments that may take readers out of the story, as when Toussaint’s father is said to have taken him to watch the Spillway opening one spring so that he would “fear death by water,” and the aforementioned boxing match is sold as a racial conflict with “white frat-bro types and their blonde ratchets, pumping fists and cheering for McGregor to whipsaw Mayweather.” That said, although the work’s examination of history is unsubtle, readers will be left with more than a few uncomfortable emotions to mull over.
A bristling, lurching, and often insightful investigation of the past.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781604893434
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: May 23, 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: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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