An enigmatic family tale with vigorous writing, colorful art, and unsettling atmospherics.
A family memorializing a dead father experiences weird happenings and bizarre cosmic visions in this graphic novel.
The story opens in 1956, with smokejumper Nathan Garrett fighting a wildfire in Montana’s Kootenai National Forest. Before he can say “cough…urk,” he and his squad are frozen in what looks like suspended animation. A year later, with Nathan pronounced dead and his body never recovered, his widow, Jolene, repairs to Kootenai’s Morning Star watchtower to sprinkle fake funerary ashes, taking along her teenage daughter, Marabeth, still angry at the world for depriving her of her dad, and young son, Charlie, who’s obsessed with SF adventures. Sleeping in the tower, Charlie has a vision of a spacefarer, complete with helmet and jet pack, who turns into Nathan. The next morning, Charlie has disappeared, leaving his toy ray gun behind, and the panicky Jolene and Marabeth split up to search for him in the woods, where they see strange visions. Marabeth’s visions include an aggressive squirrel, a purple buck deer that stands motionless on its hind legs, and a sinister forest ranger with reflective glasses who changes into a deer. Jolene has more disturbing visions of Charlie floating in the air, firefighters, Nathan, and her obstreperous sister. The apparitions say mysterious things like “Mooommmm…Help him…Help meeeee” and “Weeeee…R…Resp…onnnnsib…le”; Jolene finds them so upsetting that she starts hacking at them with an axe as they dissolve into thin air. Writers Andry and Daniel don’t put a lot of action into the story: Much of it is Marabeth and Jolene being baffled and traumatized by hallucinations until, toward the end, they miraculously resolve and impart lessons on fixing things, letting go, and working together. The scenarios and visuals have an effective, shadowy creepiness while characters’ entertainingly snarky voices leaven the lurid, psychedelic imagery. (“Great,” grouses Marabeth, “creepy moose lifting me up toward a huge floating ball of people.”) The graphics, by artist Finnegan, colorist Jason Wordie, and letterist Justin Birch, balance a throbbing orange-red-purple palette against somber blue-greens and sepia; the compositions feature oddball Mannerist perspectives, eclectic motifs from Lost in Space and the Sistine Chapel, and unstable figures that are constantly disintegrating into confetti. The storytelling lags, but there’s plenty of mood and style here to compensate.
An enigmatic family tale with vigorous writing, colorful art, and unsettling atmospherics.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781960578761
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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