A satisfying slow build featuring haunted family relationships.
Ghosts appear in many unexpected forms in the supernatural landscape of Lagos.
Nigerian writer Aguda opens her debut collection with “Manifest,” the tale of a relationship that becomes contentious when a woman recognizes her own mother in her daughter’s face. Many of the book’s ghosts are passed down through maternal lineages, and it seems that hauntings are reserved mostly for women. In “Breastmilk,” Aduke is more haunted by her mother’s fighting legacy—one she has betrayed by forgiving her husband Timi’s infidelity so easily—than she is by Timi’s betrayal. “Imagine Me Carrying You” follows another mother-daughter pair; the mother, haunted by a tragic car accident, becomes a listless and aggressive shell of a person her daughter must pause her own life to attend to. In “Girlie,” a daughter whose mother has sent her away to work must confront the ghost of her mother’s love after being kidnapped by the woman she buys tomatoes from at the market, while “The Wonders of the World” finds young Abisola on an extended school trip, where the intervention of her strange classmate Zeme finally helps her feel sure of her parents’ love. The stories that center the cowardice of male characters produce some of the book’s most delightful twists and strongest narrative structures. In one of the most notable stories, “The Hollow,” an architect named Arit visits the home of Madam Oni, a client, to find it constantly transformed by the abusive spirits of Madam’s son, husband, and father-in-law. In “Things Boys Do,” the lives of three different men converge when they discover they are connected through a tragic childhood incident. The collection builds slowly, finding its emotional stride in the second half, when the characters’ interiorities are more developed and complex. The setting of mythical Lagos also shimmers more energetically in the collection’s later stories.
A satisfying slow build featuring haunted family relationships.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781324065852
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
A magical tale about finding yourself and making a found family that will leave the reader enchanted.
A British witch takes a job as a magic tutor and finds the place she belongs.
Mika Moon's parents died when she was a child, and she's spent her entire adult life moving every few months, never staying in one place for long or getting attached to anyone. At 31, she’s been raised to keep magic secret; her sole contact with other witches is a small group she sees every three months, and she can't even text with them in between, as the group's leader thinks having too much magic in one place will draw unwanted attention. Mika does, however, do one thing that skates the edges of propriety: She posts online videos in which she "pretends" to be a witch: "Witchcore....Not quite as popular as cottagecore or fairycore, but it's up there." Then she gets an interesting request in her DMs, and Mika finds herself at Nowhere House, an old country estate, teaching three orphaned children how to control their magic. Suddenly surrounded by people who not only know her secret, but accept her for it, Mika is dangerously close to getting attached, both to the girls she’s teaching and to their caretakers, including Jamie, the cute librarian who didn't want to send for her. But with the clock ticking until an upcoming visit from a lawyer who's suspicious about the “unconventional household” and the witch rules Mika’s been raised with ringing in her ears, is this all just a bomb waiting to explode? The world Mandanna has created is exceedingly cozy and heartfelt, full of people bursting with love who have trouble expressing it due to trauma in their pasts. From the three magical girls to the elderly gay caretakers to the hot, young Irish librarian, each resident of Nowhere House is a lovingly crafted outcast reaching for family. Various threads laid out seemingly haphazardly through the story all come together in surprising ways in the last 30 pages for a finale worthy of the tale that preceded it.
A magical tale about finding yourself and making a found family that will leave the reader enchanted.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-43935-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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