A well-meaning parable that hews too closely to its moral.
A Tasmanian family grapples with death, extinction, and vanishing limbs.
Anna, Terzo, and Tommy Foley have a problem: Their 86-year-old mother, Francie, is dying, and they have to decide whether to let her. This choice pits Anna and Terzo—the “successful” siblings who, having left Tasmania to pursue joyless careers, now feel guilty for having neglected their mother—against Tommy, “a failed artist” who still lives in the Hobart area. Confusing a material existence for a meaningful one, Anna and Terzo demand life-prolonging intervention after life-prolonging intervention. Francie has surgery. She goes on dialysis. She is intubated. Time passes. Francie dwindles and suffers but, in a sense, lives. Meanwhile, Australia is burning, birds are dying, and parts of Anna’s body are vanishing. Literally. First her finger. Then her kneecap. Then another finger. Then her whole hand. Gone. “Like the thylacine and the Walkman. Like long sentences. Like smoke-free summers. Gone, never to return.” Yet what does Anna do about it? She reaches for her phone and “stare[s] solemnly at her screen,” taking a perverse comfort from the dead firefighters and charred songbirds of the Anthropocene extinction. Flanagan’s latest is haunted by a central feature of our modern epoch: human denial in the face of social and environmental cataclysm. Yet though Flanagan is justified in his outrage—the natural world is literally disappearing in front of our glazed eyes—he fails to embed his outrage in a convincingly articulated story. With every scene, every character, and every sentence deployed in unabashed support of the book’s themes, the novel lacks the narrative verisimilitude it needs to transcend the realm of polemic—a problem exacerbated by Flanagan’s summary-heavy style, his refusal to explore any setting, person, or idea with adequate depth or complexity. The disappearance of Anna’s body parts, for instance, is barely integrated into the story: She is rarely debilitated by her missing limbs, and the entire phenomenon reads like an overearnest symbol, an errant plot arc that the author, grasping for Gogol-ian profundity, pasted in and forgot to flesh out. Heartfelt though his work is, beautiful though his sentences are, Flanagan has given us an early draft—a fleshy sketch of a denser, better book.
A well-meaning parable that hews too closely to its moral.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31960-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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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