An endlessly immersive and at times awe-inspiring middle volume of a postmodern epic.
Rogers continues his lengthy account of a fictional journalist and her fictional island in his second literary novel in a trilogy, following Sailing to Noon (2023).
The island of Canuba lies in the Caribbean Sea, due south of Puerto Rico. Although it’s somewhat bigger than its more famous neighbor, the average reader might be forgiven for never having heard of it—indeed, one might think “there’s a worldwide conspiracy to keep Canuba off the map.” Long ruled by foreign powers and native autocrats, it’s most notable for “rum, baseball, sugar, beaches, and easy sex”; its own form of dance, the cambuca; and as the chosen home of Sicilian-born, Princeton University-educated journalist Chiara Trigona. The protagonist of Rogers’ previous novel, she appears in this one as the addressee of monologues by five people who loved her over the years. There’s the boisterous, ribald Lamia Metaxa, once Canuba’s premier cellist, as well as one of its most prolific lovers, who now, in the aftermath of a mental breakdown that ruined her career, recounts her years as Chiara’s closest friend and sometimes inamorata. There are the three Miranda brothers, the sons of a prominent diplomat: Virgilio, a world-renowned painter who pined after Chiara for years and who turned his own self-destruction into his artistic opus; Horacio, a sesquipedalian composer who rhapsodized Chiara in high literary style and eventually became a monk; and Catulo, a choreographer who had a fling with Chiara in college, although he was primarily interested in men. Then there’s Amado, Chiara’s plainspoken paramour whose death cast a shadow on the rest of her life—although it doesn’t prevent him from breaking into other people’s narration from time to time to say his piece.
Rogers’ novel takes the form of four long chapters, each of which moves backward in time by section toward the moment when the speaker first met Chiara. The time and place of the telling is somewhat mysterious—it turns out that Amado isn’t the only narrator who’s shuffled off this mortal coil—and each speaker is given to digressions about art, history, and politics with only a thin connection to their Sicilian muse. Even so, the author renders each voice with such specificity and vivacity that readers will be content to accompany them through whatever territory they wish. One section of Virgilio’s monologue takes the form of a 13-page poem, narrating Chiara’s trip after drinking a hallucinogenic tea; in another, Lamia’s synesthesia causes her to imagine her cello metamorphosing into a giant penis, mid-performance. The sharpest writing is often the most direct, as when Chiara gazes out at the ocean and says to Lamia, “I’m grateful to you for this sea. Yes, it’s a gift from you. I’m still in love with the fickle Caribbean, in all its varied moods. On sunny days like today, it’s a thousand tones of blue and green, from midnight to aquamarine.” Canuba may not be real, but in Rogers’ evocation of its history, its art, and its denizens, he captures something of the irrepressible invention and intoxication of Caribbean culture. An endlessly immersive and at times awe-inspiring middle volume of a postmodern epic.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781963908794
Page Count: 492
Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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