An engrossing and creative story of the wonders of the unknown with an Icelandic accent.
An anthropologist and his sidekick investigate a mysterious video that may show a unicorn in this novel that blends an Icelandic adventure with magical realism.
Mark Sandoval’s alien abduction memoir was made into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Brad Pitt, and he plans to study otherworldly beings further on a site visit to Iceland. Without revealing all of his aims, the self-described “renowned cultural anthropologist” and “famed cryptozoologist” enlists as his research assistant Brian Schutt, a headache-prone academic with a doctoral dissertation that's stuck in creative limbo back in Portland, Oregon. Schutt is mystified by the geometric scarring that covers his boss’s body—a “cosmic roadmap” or perhaps “warning or prophecy,” Sandoval’s memoir had suggested. Once both men trek to the Icelandic town of Hvíldarland, they bond over their shared fascination with mythical entities, cryptic creatures, and historical lore. Sandoval soon reveals the expedition’s true purpose: to investigate a grainy video sent to Sandoval of what looks like a unicorn on a pumpkin farm. Though Schutt is more skeptical, the trip provides a timely escape from his messy family melodrama and a dire health diagnosis. As they dig deeper into the area’s mystical folklore and haunted forest, all of it becomes a terrific thrill for Schutt, a man “still doggy-paddling through his academic career,” and Sandoval, hoping to lay claim to discovering the elusive creature with droppings that consist of “a gleaming coruscation of granulated glitter.” As in his Smoke City (2017), Rosson offers crisp characterization and surprising twists. Here he maps a magical journey through the wilds of rural Iceland and into a kaleidoscopic terrain filled with secretly active military bases and muddied body parts that sully what began as an innocent expedition into the supernatural. While the conclusion is disappointingly hokey and doesn’t quite measure up to the narrative mysticism and preternatural wonder preceding it, Rosson’s clever, swiftly paced story has more than enough to keep readers turning the pages and wanting to believe.
An engrossing and creative story of the wonders of the unknown with an Icelandic accent.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-946154-29-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Meerkat Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
