A sometimes enjoyable, sometimes uneven homage to an oft-romanticized era.
A man fresh from the Navy must revitalize a leftist playhouse in this satirical counterculture novel.
San Francisco, 1968. The oddly named Student Patterson has just wrapped up his naval service aboard a refrigerator ship, but his post-discharge plans are not panning out. His fiancee, Debbie, sent him a Dear John letter—calling him a killer and also explaining their lack of sexual compatibility. Student then drowned his grief in a brothel in Saigon, and he now has a full complement of venereal diseases to deal with. He can at least enter his theater and folklore Ph.D. program as planned—though his advising professor has determined he is painfully underqualified. Student’s assigned to put on a play in the theater of the Butcher’s Town Writer’s Guild, which he discovers—just after he is pickpocketed—sits in a bad part of the city. During his initial meeting with the Thespian Committee, Student’s heart sinks further: “This collection of lame-brained, anachronistic Never-Weres and Has-Beens added up to the most catastrophic graduate program” in the long history “of colleges and universities. If needs be, he would hitchhike back to Iowa and raise chickens.” Due to his recent experiences with Debbie, Student has decided to adopt a “program of informed misogyny.” But his anti-women policy will be challenged by several students and colleagues, including the middle-aged socialist and set designer Millicent Rothstein, the grade-grubbing mother of two Jessica Bolton, and Debbie, who has not yet left his life for good—and who now has a baby in tow. Can Student repair his relationship with women, put on his play, earn his Ph.D., and successfully bridge the cultural gap between Vietnam veterans and hippie longhairs? It’s San Francisco in the late ’60s, so anything is possible.
Warner’s playful satire skewers many of the familiar types one finds in stories of ’60s America, often in unexpected ways. For instance, Student’s pickpocketing occurs when he’s stopped on his way to the theater by two older women who wish to give a hug to a patriotic serviceman—and promptly rob him blind. “One thing Mr. Student—south of Market—you worry less about flowers in your hair and more about creatures like those two misfits of femininity—they are a more effective criminal combo than if Mata-Hari and Carmen teamed up,” warns one of his new theater colleagues. The book has a number of postmodern flourishes, including a literal Greek chorus, the “Seers of Future Present,” that breaks in from time to time to warn Student about the trouble he’s about to get in for offending various powers. The story attempts to undermine Student’s posture of misogyny, but in doing so, it acts out quite a bit of it. There’s a lot of sexualizing going on—in part, perhaps, due to the free-love projects of many of the characters—but it sometimes leads to moments of extreme unpleasantness. (For instance, the Saigon sex workers Student patronizes are remarked to be no older than 15 years old.) The novel ends up walking a fine line between serving as a satire of a certain sort of libidinous male fantasy and becoming the thing itself.
A sometimes enjoyable, sometimes uneven homage to an oft-romanticized era.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60489-268-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2021
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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