A luminous collection of stories found in the thin margins between loss, failure, and redemption.
Troubled doctors and office drones look for meaning by methods both mundane and magical in Grinnell’s short stories.
The Bostonian characters in this collection are mostly doctors who feel guilty about their inability to save patients and white-collar workers numbed by purposeless routines yearning for more authentic existences. They include a neurosurgeon, grief-stricken by her sister’s death, who drinks a psychedelic ayahuasca potion and gains the ability to resurrect the dead; a buttoned-down website manager who resolves to help a frustrated aquarium orca escape to the sea; a Harvard researcher in Kenya who is confronted by a woman who implores him to cure her daughter’s terminal case of malaria; a film student who makes a documentary on the thwarted lives of a hospital’s marketing team; a would-be writer who grows disillusioned with self-improvement nostrums before inventing his own; and a psychiatrist who struggles to save a depressed woman who vows to commit suicide on her 25th birthday if she doesn’t cheer up. The author makes absorbing digressions into everything from motorcycle maintenance to firefly bioluminescence, and poses quiet but passionate philosophical challenges to his characters in their quests for self-actualization. Grinnell writes vividly in many registers, from spooky action (“Allie exhaled. ‘Breathe.’ Suddenly the patient twitched. Then his back contorted, and he inhaled a massive gulp of air”) to shrewd, anthropological dissections of toxic office politics (“it seemed common practice for employees to weaponize HR against one another”). He illuminates plangent feelings of sickness and sorrow, as in the title story, in which a husband neglects his wife in a futile effort to find a cure for her illness (“An embrace wouldn’t have taken away her cancer, but at least she wouldn’t have felt so alone and cold during those long, dark winter nights”). The result is an entertaining set of tales that pack an emotional wallop.
A luminous collection of stories found in the thin margins between loss, failure, and redemption.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2023
ISBN: 979-8-88838-375-9
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.
A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.
Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374172
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A well-constructed and enjoyable conclusion.
In the conclusion to the Emily Wilde trilogy, a Cambridge professor of dryadology—faerie studies—prepares to live her research as never before.
Previously, in Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (2024), Emily poisoned Queen Arna, the usurping stepmother of her faerie-prince fiance, Wendell Bambleby, and found a gate to Wendell’s lost kingdom; naturally, the process of establishing a new monarchy in a quixotic faerie realm will be far from smooth. Unfortunately, Arna is not quite dead; she is using her poisoned, liminal state to blight the very landscape. Emily must employ her specific mortal skills (academic research and unrelenting resolve) to find the faerie lore that best describes their current situation, picking out the clues within scraps of old tales to locate the hidden, dying queen, and deal with her in a way that doesn’t lead to further damage. Although much of what she learns is grim, Emily forges on, determined to discover the path to a happy ending for herself and Wendell, where she can be the faerie queen she never imagined she’d be (and is frankly quite uncomfortable being). Thankfully, this concluding volume isn’t the feared retread of the previous two, both of which involved Emily’s research in remote European locations and her efforts to get on with the human locals, even while her obvious neurospiciness and deep understanding of rules allow her to deal with faeries more effectively than most mortals can. This installment makes effective callbacks to the previous two, while moving the story forward as Emily, despite the concerns of her mortal friends, tries to make a place for herself in a dangerous new world where not all of her subjects are prepared to take her seriously. Janet of Carterhaugh merely had to drag her lover Tam Lin from a horse to secure her happiness from a vengeful faerie queen; Emily has to put in real work, using her brain and plunging into physical danger to earn her future. The result is far more satisfying and believable, despite being mainly set in a fantastical world.
A well-constructed and enjoyable conclusion.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593500224
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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