Of minor interest against Laxness’ best-known works, but full of his trademark intersections of politics and religion.
A brooding novel of boreal discontentments by the Nobel Prize–winning Icelandic writer.
Sigurlína Jónsdóttir has always been down on her luck. She decides to leave the frozen north coast of Iceland with her 11-year-old daughter, Salvör Valgerður, or Salka, whose father is unknown to her—and to Sigurlína, a sometime prostitute, as well. They get just a few miles south to a ramshackle fishing village, where they discover the manifold class divisions of early-20th-century Iceland, though no one, rich or poor, seems keen on keeping up hygiene. As Salka grows up, she experiences all the unhappy turns of a Bergman film (and Laxness began this book as a screenplay): sexual abuse, violence, betrayal, suicide. And always the smell of fish. Sigurlína wants little other than enough to eat and a place in the Salvation Army, which figures strongly throughout Laxness’ four-part novel as the only anchor to which she can cling, though in the end it proves just as useless as any other. Salka, meanwhile, is born to rebel. On entering school, asked who Iceland’s ruler is (in those days, the king of Denmark via an appointed minister), she responds, “No one’s going to rule over me!” Alas, the volcano of a man called Steinþór Steinsson, Bluto to Sigurlína’s Olive Oyl, has different ideas: “When it came right down to it,” Salka decides, “Steinþór Steinsson was the devil.” There’s a poetry to Laxness’ depiction of a frayed mother-daughter relationship: “Out in the night, she had no Mama,” Salka thinks. “Out in the night was only the girl, Sigurlína Jónsdóttir, and she was not her mother.” But there’s also some jarring language, as when Steinþór berates a cleric for being the most contentious man he’s ever encountered, “despite my having had to associate with both negroes and sodomites.” The words speak ill of Steinþór, but they mark Laxness’ novel as being a century old, and on every page it reads like it.
Of minor interest against Laxness’ best-known works, but full of his trademark intersections of politics and religion.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953861-24-5
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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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