A cleareyed and engaging, if familiar, apocalyptic yarn.
A young man heads across the Atlantic, seeking refuge on a rapidly collapsing planet.
We meet 20-year-old Lark, the narrator of House’s seventh novel, on an overcrowded yacht full of refugees headed from Maine to Ireland. Climate change has sparked devastating fires across America, and aggressive, heavily armed militias enforce a hard-line religious doctrine that makes Lark a target as a gay man. After an arduous trek across the sea that kills many of the passengers, including both of his parents, Lark arrives in Ireland on little more than a rumor that he’ll have a safe haven in Glendalough, a spiritually blessed place said to be both progressive and spared the worst of the climate disaster. Along the way he befriends a dog—a rare creature now in this cruel hellscape—and a woman savvy about the landscape and its threats. House delivers this straightforward adventure with efficiency and poignancy, capturing the brief idyll of freedom Lark and his family enjoyed before leaving and the newfound appreciation he has for an environment and liberal society that are both rapidly collapsing. And the novel’s style has a clarity and rough-hewn simplicity that bring the story’s conflicts into sharp relief. (It’s no accident that the dog is named Seamus, a tribute to the Irish Nobel winner Seamus Heaney, the earthiest of great Irish poets.) The novel’s chief flaw is its overfamiliarity, to the point of almost feeling like a pastiche of dystopian-novel plots and styles: At various points the story contains echoes of The Dog Stars, I Am Legend, The Road, American War, Station Eleven, and more. House seamlessly works in present-day concerns about rampant fundamentalism and willful ignorance about climate catastrophe, but for anybody well versed in the genre, this will feel like well-trod ground.
A cleareyed and engaging, if familiar, apocalyptic yarn.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64375-159-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
An ambitious epic that doesn’t quite work.
A Hungarian family reckons with history and their own demons.
When Lajos von Lázár is born at the turn of the 20th century, his father, Sándor, a Hungarian baron, is “slightly unsettled”: The baby is translucent, his organs visible, “blond, blue-eyed, and jellyfish-skinned.” Sándor, who suspects, correctly, the baby is not his biological child, comes from a family beset with problems; their manor abuts a forest that “had swallowed his father, killed his mother, and driven his brother mad.” He is a strict, unsmiling father to Lajos and his sister, Ilona, and a cold partner to his wife, Mária, a troubled woman who cuts her skin daily to remind herself she is still alive. Lajos and Ilona spend their childhood in the manor, occasionally encountering mysterious creatures in the seemingly haunted forest, finding happiness only when Sándor is out of town. Biedermann’s novel follows the Lázár family through the next several decades, as the First and Second World Wars ravage central Europe: Mária dies by suicide, which exacerbates the drinking problem that eventually leads to Sándor’s death. Lajos inherits his father’s estate and starts a family of his own, but his life is marked by a cowardice he hates in himself, especially when he fails to stand up to the Nazis who have occupied Hungary. Lajos’ skin isn’t the only magical-realist touch Biedermann includes; many come and go along the way, but it’s not clear what the effect is supposed to be—they seem to be quirks for quirks’ sake. He introduces characters who disappear for long stretches, and the novel features time jumps that jar and disorient. His prose, in Bulloch’s translation, has some shining moments, but the novel as a whole never really comes together. At 21, Biedermann is an exceptionally young writer, and it shows, but he does display a talent that, though unformed, evinces promise.
An ambitious epic that doesn’t quite work.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781668200551
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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