A successful set of tales of appealing peculiarity.
In de Valera’s linked short story collection, a cop and his goofy friends grow older in coastal Australia.
Narcotics agent Michael O’Neill is getting a bit old to still be going undercover, but he lives for his job. When his superiors send him to Australia’s rural Northern Rivers region to bust a heroin dealer known as God, he heads for the hippie-inhabited hinterland—a popular spot for drug users and dropouts ever since the Nimbin Aquarius Festival popularized the area in 1973— accompanied by his crystal-elephant–collecting girlfriend, Azure, and his colleague Baby Johnson, who suffers from PTSD and likes to read stories about Conan the Barbarian. After a successful bust, the crew decides to stay in the area, where they meet an assortment of countercultural characters that help keep life interesting: Star, a single mother with a checkered romantic history who grows and sells marijuana in order to buy a wood stove; an eccentric, mentally ill man named David and his on-again, off-again wife, Doreen, who recently quit a Christian cult; and later, God, aka Lawson, who acclimates to civilian life after a seven-year stint in prison—at least until he starts to lose his sight. The collection spans the 1970s through the 2010s and beyond, painting a portrait of Australia’s hippie generation as it ages. De Valera’s prose is fresh and surprising, as here in a 2002-set story about Lawson: “On the day he planned to kill himself, the day he’d decided had the best chance of success, he rose at six as usual.” The stories are all slice-of-life pieces, but they’re far from predictable, lurching forward and backward in time and between different characters’ perspectives. (The final chapter, “Another Lifetime,” takes place in 2137 and features future incarnations of Michael and Azure.) It’s such an unexpected assortment of genres—crime stories, drug tales, SF—that it can’t help but circumvent readers’ expectations. It makes for a great beach read, whether on the coast of New South Wales or the other side of the world.
A successful set of tales of appealing peculiarity.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9942745-2-6
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Old Tiger Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2022
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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