An intriguing but emotionally shallow picaresque about an invisible man.
A man finds invisibility much better and much worse than he could ever have imagined in this literary novel.
Freelance writer Charlie Cain is suffering from a pain in his lower back. He’s reluctant to go to the doctor—both because he has no health insurance and because his girlfriend, Amber Dressing, recently left him for a physician—but the discomfort becomes more than he can bear. On the recommendation of an acquaintance, he sees a very unconventional medic who prescribes him a vial of drops, one to be taken under the tongue with each meal. Charlie starts right away, and, by the next day, the pain has started to disappear. Unfortunately, there is a pretty severe side effect: “It was then that he saw something anomalous about his hands and forearms. They were—almost transparent. They flickered like an old film and seemed lit by a lemony inner light. He shook one and it was flesh and then not-flesh, flesh and then not-flesh.” Charlie immediately starts enjoying his invisibility: running around naked, rooting through his friend’s house, spying on his attractive neighbor while she’s undressed. When he goes back to the doctor to figure out what happened, the office has closed, as if it were never there. Freshly uninhibited, Charlie embarks on a new life as a burglar, prankster, and voyeur. He becomes obsessed with an agoraphobic painter still mourning her dead husband and begins an affair with a New Age priestess who thinks he’s a god. But soon people will start to realize Charlie is missing. And it’s only a matter of time before he decides to use his new ability to try to win Amber back.
The novel is told with a fair bit of ironic distance—the characters have not-quite-real names like Sudie Nimm and Patience Spent—which keeps readers from asking too many questions about the how and why of things. Mesler’s imagery is often surprising, as here in his description of a man at a Neighborhood Watch meeting where Charlie’s crime spree is discussed (Charlie, of course, is present as well): “The police officer who attended was named Peter Natural. He was a large, Aryan fellow, as handsome as a coat of mail. His leather gleamed. His revolver looked as big as canned ham.” The author’s prose can also be a bit too cute, as here where he describes one of Charlie’s lovers’ nether regions: “Her furze bush was black as sloe and thick like a thicket.” It’s an unexpectedly raunchy tale. A startling number of women want to have sex with this unknown invisible man—even on a city bus—and Charlie is more than happy to comply. Disappointingly, the female characters are quite flat and primarily exist as objects of Charlie’s desire. Readers will be left wishing that the story had tried a bit harder to be about something more than male fantasies. Invisibility is a fertile and well-explored concept in fiction, yet Mesler doesn’t actually find much to say about it.
An intriguing but emotionally shallow picaresque about an invisible man.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60-489281-9
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2021
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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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