An intense, unflinching, and supernatural coming-of-age tale.
When Leisl Davis begins her first year at Smith College, she gets a spot in a competitive seminar on the history of witchcraft that turns out to be more practical than she could have ever imagined.
Leisl isn’t doing so well when she moves into her dorm at Smith. She battles with suicidal tendencies and self-loathing and is trying desperately to convince herself that she isn’t attracted to girls. She meets a friendly, handsome Amherst student named Tripp, but when he rapes her, she is denied support or even validation from school or the authorities. Leisl befriends Luna, another of Tripp’s victims, and immediately feels an attraction. They sign up for a seminar led by the enigmatic professor Sienna Weiss, who whittles the course down to Liesl, Luna, and two other girls, Gabi and Charlotte. Sienna reveals to the students that they are not a class, they are a coven, and under her guidance they learn how to perform real magic. They progress quickly, but their bond is complicated when Luna and Gabi start dating and Leisl cannot contain her jealousy, nor her untreated PTSD. When the coven learns that Tripp and his Amherst frat buddies have somehow developed magical powers of their own, Leisl drives the coven to take justice into their own hands. This debut is a bit rough around the edges but is often quite brilliant, particularly when Leisl reflects on the ways women and girls are demonized simply for protecting themselves: “might you see that, in order to be safe in houses of God, much less the untamed wild of streets and bars, we must grow snakes from our scalps and learn to turn men to stone—just to go outside?” Harlowe writes Leisl’s point of view in rushing, furious sentences, depicting her increasingly fraught mental state while also leaving room for friendship, love, and healing in the slightly uneven ending.
An intense, unflinching, and supernatural coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5220-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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