This gripping, kaleidoscopic crime novel has a gritty tone infused with plangent emotion.
The search for a missing girl gives blighted lives hope for redemption in this haunting verse novel.
George’s story centers on the romance between Bad Boy—a ne’er-do-well who robs pharmacies and joyrides around the town of Hollow Rock, Tennessee—and his 15-year-old girlfriend Alison, whose grandmother has threatened to shoot him. After a season of furtive, passionate trysts, Alison dumps him for a local meth-head, which leads to violence and to Bad Boy taking Alison against her will across the Mississippi to West Memphis, Arkansas; she finally escapes him at the Flying J truck stop and is last seen jumping into the cab of a random trucker who drives off with her. The novel then shifts to the perspective of “the Chaplain,” an ex-con who stages Christian revival meetings in a tent backed by a band featuring Debbie, a former sex worker, on drums. The Chaplain’s sermons stress that no one is too sinful and low to be forgiven and saved by Jesus, a proposition that’s challenged by a sinister trucker who announces his own unforgiveable sin: killing a girl. The Chaplain and his band fall in with a female trucker who witnessed the Flying J incident, retrieved the pink sneaker Alison left on the tarmac, and has been putting up missing-persons posters with Alison’s picture wherever she goes; at one of the Chaplain’s meetings, the sinister trucker comes onto her radar as a likely suspect in Alison’s disappearance. The stories of Ruth, the trucker’s sister who recalls his disturbing childhood behavior, and the West Memphis police detective who shrugs off Alison’s disappearance but gets pulled in deeper, are also braided into the narrative.
The story unfolds in a perfectly rendered, hardscrabble South seen through the eyes of working-class people with industrial-strength vehicles navigating an archipelago of strip malls and truck plazas connected by roaring interstates and shadowy county roads. George writes in a poetic meter as supple as the most naturalistic prose; the writing is grounded in plain, earthy English but has a musicality that makes it feel like a biblical parable or a hillbilly highwayman’s ballad. (“A dustball cheapskate town and Broad / Street much the way is just two lanes, / which goes to show you what broad counts / for here—and Hollow Rock is Nowhere / Tennessee, but, like they say, / it’s home.”) The author writes about tawdry lives riddled with bad decisions, but finds a lyrical beauty in them. (“A girl like Alison you don’t / find at the Carroll County Fair. / She’s like a light you see at night / too low on the horizon and / you think you see an airplane crashing—you listen for the sound and hear / none, turn on the TV and there’s / no news, and then you wonder what / you saw and did you even see it?— / something bright and terrible, / the beauty hurts your eyes, you only / wish you’d see it once again.”) Readers will be captivated by George’s dark, hallucinatory vision and gorgeous language.
This gripping, kaleidoscopic crime novel has a gritty tone infused with plangent emotion.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781604893717
Page Count: 216
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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