An unusual take on the power of memory.
A Puerto Rican woman displaced from her home and her own past builds a surprising life.
Teenage Luz Peña Fuentes is happy growing up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1975. Her doting parents, Salvadora and Federico, are multilingual research scientists who provide their only child with a warm home and complete support for the lessons she hopes will lead to a career as a ballerina. Their love helps counter the bullying she sometimes suffers as “the tallest girl and the only Black one” in the ballet school. But a car crash destroys Luz’s world, killing her parents and leaving her with serious physical and mental disabilities. She has no memory of her earlier life—a small mercy in that she can’t remember the accident and, for a short time, she forgets what racism is. For the rest of her life, the few memories she can hang onto will be secondhand—the memories others tell her about, not her own. The novel alternates between Luz’s girlhood and her life four decades later in the Bronx in 2017, where her grandfather took her to live after the accident. He’s gone now, but Luz has a family circle to support her. Two of them are women who have cared for her since the accident: a lesbian couple named Shirley and Ada. Luz, Shirley, and Ada call themselves las madres. The rest of the circle is las nenas: Luz’s daughter, Marysol, and Ada and Shirley’s daughter, Graciela. Luz functions well in some ways—she married and had Marysol, then lost her young husband in another tragic event. She makes a living as an artist but still has almost no memory and is dependent on the other four women in daily life. To help answer Marysol’s longing to understand more about her mother’s past and her native Puerto Rico, the five women plan a vacation there—in hurricane season—that will be full of unexpected challenges and shocking revelations. As can happen in novels with narratives split between different time periods, in this one the chapters set in the 1970s are more vivid and engaging than many of those set in the present, which can bog down in extended passages of exposition. Luz’s shattered memory serves to a degree as a metaphor for the Puerto Rican diaspora and the lasting effects of colonialism, but the book’s core is its strong female friendships.
An unusual take on the power of memory.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780307962614
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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