A satisfying slow build featuring haunted family relationships.
Ghosts appear in many unexpected forms in the supernatural landscape of Lagos.
Nigerian writer Aguda opens her debut collection with “Manifest,” the tale of a relationship that becomes contentious when a woman recognizes her own mother in her daughter’s face. Many of the book’s ghosts are passed down through maternal lineages, and it seems that hauntings are reserved mostly for women. In “Breastmilk,” Aduke is more haunted by her mother’s fighting legacy—one she has betrayed by forgiving her husband Timi’s infidelity so easily—than she is by Timi’s betrayal. “Imagine Me Carrying You” follows another mother-daughter pair; the mother, haunted by a tragic car accident, becomes a listless and aggressive shell of a person her daughter must pause her own life to attend to. In “Girlie,” a daughter whose mother has sent her away to work must confront the ghost of her mother’s love after being kidnapped by the woman she buys tomatoes from at the market, while “The Wonders of the World” finds young Abisola on an extended school trip, where the intervention of her strange classmate Zeme finally helps her feel sure of her parents’ love. The stories that center the cowardice of male characters produce some of the book’s most delightful twists and strongest narrative structures. In one of the most notable stories, “The Hollow,” an architect named Arit visits the home of Madam Oni, a client, to find it constantly transformed by the abusive spirits of Madam’s son, husband, and father-in-law. In “Things Boys Do,” the lives of three different men converge when they discover they are connected through a tragic childhood incident. The collection builds slowly, finding its emotional stride in the second half, when the characters’ interiorities are more developed and complex. The setting of mythical Lagos also shimmers more energetically in the collection’s later stories.
A satisfying slow build featuring haunted family relationships.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781324065852
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
A magical tale about finding yourself and making a found family that will leave the reader enchanted.
A British witch takes a job as a magic tutor and finds the place she belongs.
Mika Moon's parents died when she was a child, and she's spent her entire adult life moving every few months, never staying in one place for long or getting attached to anyone. At 31, she’s been raised to keep magic secret; her sole contact with other witches is a small group she sees every three months, and she can't even text with them in between, as the group's leader thinks having too much magic in one place will draw unwanted attention. Mika does, however, do one thing that skates the edges of propriety: She posts online videos in which she "pretends" to be a witch: "Witchcore....Not quite as popular as cottagecore or fairycore, but it's up there." Then she gets an interesting request in her DMs, and Mika finds herself at Nowhere House, an old country estate, teaching three orphaned children how to control their magic. Suddenly surrounded by people who not only know her secret, but accept her for it, Mika is dangerously close to getting attached, both to the girls she’s teaching and to their caretakers, including Jamie, the cute librarian who didn't want to send for her. But with the clock ticking until an upcoming visit from a lawyer who's suspicious about the “unconventional household” and the witch rules Mika’s been raised with ringing in her ears, is this all just a bomb waiting to explode? The world Mandanna has created is exceedingly cozy and heartfelt, full of people bursting with love who have trouble expressing it due to trauma in their pasts. From the three magical girls to the elderly gay caretakers to the hot, young Irish librarian, each resident of Nowhere House is a lovingly crafted outcast reaching for family. Various threads laid out seemingly haphazardly through the story all come together in surprising ways in the last 30 pages for a finale worthy of the tale that preceded it.
A magical tale about finding yourself and making a found family that will leave the reader enchanted.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-43935-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A reasonably charming urban fantasy that could have used a more rigorous edit before primetime.
The latest in a series of rereleases from a prolific fantasist’s previously self-published works is a contemporary spin on the fairytale “Godfather Death.”
Viola Marek is an aswang, a shapeshifting vampire from Filipino folklore. She’s also a Chicago real estate agent trying to sell a mansion even while the ghost of its last owner, Thomas Edward Parker IV, is doing his supernatural best to block the sale. In a desperate attempt to earn her commission, she hires Fox D’Mora, Death’s mortal godson, to use his connection to get the ghost to leave. Unfortunately, Death is unavailable: He’s been kidnapped, and to get him back and prevent a worlds-spanning catastrophe, Fox, Vi, the ghost, and assorted other supernatural creatures will have to enter a high-stakes gambling game that usually only immortals can play…but rarely win. The story begins with an unusual blend of myth, fairy tale, and cosmology and inevitably descends to an almost unbearable level of sentimentality, which is simultaneously a refreshing change from Blake’s usual tableau of self-involved, selfish characters who seem driven toward tragedies of their own making. Blake could definitely do a better job at showing the love between characters rather than merely telling the reader that they’re in love. She also has an unfortunate tendency to skip potentially intriguing bits of backstory if they don’t immediately drive the plot along, which is why readers never learn anything about Fox’s childhood and what it was actually like having Death as a parent. Nor does she explain why only two of the four archangels, Gabriel and Raphael, play outsize roles in determining the order of the cosmos, while Uriel and Michael are nowhere to be seen. Bits of anachronism—like the use of a rubber band as aversion therapy 200 years ago or the presence of a magical wristwatch from a time long before watches were common—might be intended to be Pratchett-style humor or chalked up to magic? It’s hard to tell what’s intentional and what is simply careless. Now that Blake has a traditional publisher, perhaps the editors of her future novels will guide the author to address these issues when they arise.
A reasonably charming urban fantasy that could have used a more rigorous edit before primetime.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781250892461
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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