A gloomy but eye-opening look at the startling impact of school sports.
The sudden death of a former high school football star shakes a small Texas community in Bills’ novella.
Deputy Lane Fisher works at the sheriff’s department in his hometown of Tarry, Texas. One day, he happens upon a parked van with a bloody body inside—certainly not something he witnesses every day in his small burg. Signs ultimately point to a likely suicide, but what’s even more shocking is the victim’s identity: The dead man is Lane’s high-school football teammate Clifton Baird, the so-called Tarry Tornado. His hulking size had made him a star on the football field in the early 1980s (“he was a tank that ran like a gazelle”). That all changed after a collision during practice left another player horribly injured. But was Clifton’s resultant guilt the reason his pro football career was so short? Was that why he felt suicide was his only choice? Lane reunites with old teammates and Clifton’s ex; answers to the mystery of this once-revered athlete’s fate may not be quite what the deputy expects. Bills zeroes in on the pressures that high school athletes face: The coach humiliated players during practices, and there’s a possibility that Tarry locals blamed the injured teammate for derailing a potentially stellar season. The somber narrative is layered with haunting images involving a man who couldn’t let his past go. An especially memorable scene finds Lane looking through Clifton’s home, where he had lived alone; the TV is on, playing an old football game, surrounded by VHS tapes of high-school games. The final act retains the overall bluntness of the narrative with a surprising but effective turn. Trailing this story is the bonus tale “Dead to Rights,” in which Texan Randy has a surreal experience—he wakes up in the middle of a road and runs into a Tex Cobb-lookalike with news Randy may not want to hear.
A gloomy but eye-opening look at the startling impact of school sports.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9798218264642
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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