A powerful novel—heartbreaking, magical, and real.
A young girl becomes a refugee in her own land in this fairy tale–adjacent bildungsroman.
When war comes to the small, idiosyncratic country of Elysia, no one is quite surprised, but neither are they prepared. For Sofia Bottom-Zier, the pampered young daughter of Elysian’s leading intellectual, the time between the Enemy’s invasion of their country’s borders and their inevitable march on the Capital has been a pleasurable interlude of intrigue, drama, and a renewed closeness to her difficult and mercurial mother, Clara. This comes to an end when the Enemy announces that they will allow all Elysian children safe passage out of the Capital on a special train, and Clara hastens to make sure Sofia is on it. Sofia’s safety is not Clara’s primary concern, however. Her much larger goal is to smuggle out the manuscript she has written and concealed inside Sofia’s suitcase, which she hopes will convey to the Western world that the country of Elysia is worth saving. “Of course the book is more important than you,” Clara tells her daughter. “It’s my memoir, yes. But it’s more important than me. It’s the celebration of an Elysian life. What are any of us except expendable during a war? It’s the idea of freedom that has to be saved.” With that admonition ringing in her ears, Sofia boards the Children’s Train heading toward the vague safety of “the countryside.” It soon becomes clear, however, that the Enemy has no intention of rescuing the children, and is instead shipping them to their executions. Sofia escapes, but in the commotion, she loses track of the suitcase with her mother’s manuscript inside. Accompanied by the Goose, a “public intellectual” who is also an actual goose with big dreams of a future in the Capital, Sofia sets off across the war-torn landscape of her erstwhile country in search of the Black Market—a near-mythical place where everything “illegal and forbidden and delightful ended up,” including, Sofia hopes, her mother’s manuscript, and the country’s potential salvation. The novel is told in fairy tale cadence and peppered with sophisticated animals, sensitive objects, and the enduring magic of folklore forests; its raw power lies in the way it blends the realities of war with the equally trenchant realities of its child narrator’s perspective as she navigates her suddenly irredeemable world.
A powerful novel—heartbreaking, magical, and real.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063425996
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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