A stunning book which paints the portrait of a broken life with honesty and compassion.
A young Swedish woman who has been brutally murdered spends her afterlife looking down on the Earth she has left behind.
Kristina is only 24 when she dies. She leaves behind her estranged parents, Raksha and Ivan, her dying husband, Shane, and her two children, Valle and Solveig, the elder taken by the state when he was 3 and the younger given up at birth to an adoptive family. Kristina also leaves behind the heroin addiction that gave her days immediate purpose and her murderer, an unnamed man who remembers her with more specific passion than anyone else in her abbreviated life. From her formless position in the afterlife, Kristina looks in on the people she left behind, both as their lives continue and as they existed in the significant moments she revisits as she drifts through a suddenly nonlinear experience of time. Yet, as cruel as the facts of Kristina’s life were—suffused with abandonment, abuse, sorrow, and death—the way she sees the world as it progresses without her is articulated with a kind of pragmatic hope. Nothing will change the facts of death or the bleakness that often precedes it, but what Kristina sees in Raksha as she struggles to live on as the mother of a murdered child; in Valle as he fights his own demons, so similar to his mother’s; in Solveig as she grows into the adult Kristina never had the chance to become are as real as the wasteland that spreads inside the mind of the murderer who chose Kristina to kill precisely because she seemed unafraid to die. In fragmented sections that echo with longing, loss, unutterable sorrow, and yet also a species of joy and light, Stridsberg explores the mind of a woman who gave up her life long before it was taken from her. There is a familiar tradition of dead-girl media in which “the only person of interest…is the murderer, and [the victim] is just a brief glimpse, a blur of green body, and then she is gone, out of the picture, disappearing into the depths of nothingness whence she came.” This book is the antidote to that kind of brutal anonymizing—a novel in which both the wicked and the sublime are scrutinized with the same care by the watchful eyes of the dead.
A stunning book which paints the portrait of a broken life with honesty and compassion.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-27269-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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