A historically astute tale with deep emotional impact.
An engineer working for an illicit labor union risks his life to secure their funds in Lagodzki’s novel.
In 1982, Antoni Adamczyk (he prefers to go by Antek) is an engineer in Frombork, Poland, living under martial law imposed by the Soviet Union. He works for the local union chapter of Solidarity—a group that opposes the Soviet occupation—as its treasurer, in charge of the $20,000 he’s securely hidden in Zygmuntowo. When he runs afoul of the authorities, he is imprisoned, though the money remains safe. Antek is given a fraught chance at freedom—he declares that this is all he really wants for himself and his future children—by Roman Stelmach, a major in the Bezpieka, the secret police. Roman allows Antek to escape so he will lead him to the money, a sum that will allow Roman to begin his life afresh in Rio de Janeiro. In this riveting tale, sleepy Zygmuntowo is the stage for an anxious, gathering intrigue—there, a telephone operator, Emilia Sokołowska, finds herself entrusted with the money and suddenly becomes a potential target of Roman and his henchmen as well. Emilia is an extraordinary character, an artfully drawn symbol of Poland’s humiliation under Soviet despotism—she is reduced to spying on the phone calls of others, cataloging their “sin, love, and banality” and reporting them to the police. She falls in love with her best friend, Kalina, who is being repeatedly raped by her father, Pan Zalewski. Emilia hatches a plan to exact revenge upon Pan called Operation Pig, which is to be executed with another of her closest friends, Agata, also the victim of his sexual abuse. Emilia’s mother is a Communist Party functionary, and as a result she enjoys a certain measure of protection from the authorities, but Emilia is finally drawn into a predicament that her mother will not be able to extricate her from.
Lagodzki’s depiction of Poland’s plight is both subtle and luridly vivid; every significant character, including Roman (ostensibly an enforcer of tyranny), longs to be delivered into liberty. Roman might be the novel’s most complex character. In his youth, he planned on becoming an architect, but once his girlfriend, Bernadeta, became pregnant, he was compelled to drop out of school and find work with the Bezpieka; he’s an ordinary man endowed with an opportunistic nihilism. Emilia is a tantalizingly rich character as well, a moving example of the ways in which totalitarianism makes a private life distinct from political reality simply impossible. While the novel is politically savvy, the two main plots are essentially affecting love stories—the love of Emilia for Kalina and of Antek for his wife, Dorota. Here, the author captures the tender shock of electricity Kalina catalyzes in Emilia’s heart, setting off a conflagration of ungovernable emotion: “Did the desire to kiss Kalina make her a freak? As if the missed masses and holy communions had accumulated to mount a set of devil’s horns on her forehead. Horns or not, if she had any money, she would have given all of it to Kalina just to see her smile.” Lagodzki’s prose is as powerful as his plot is gripping.
A historically astute tale with deep emotional impact.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9798888192061
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Milford House Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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