An ambitious novel written in sometimes overly ambitious prose, this book charms, intrigues, and bewilders.
A century-spanning murder mystery that focuses more on the identities of the victims than the killers.
Iridia is a forensic sculptor in Brooklyn working for the Missing Persons bureau. Her job is to reconstruct the faces of unidentified skeletal remains in order to help identify them. The functionally orphaned child of two imprisoned, weed-growing anarchists, Iridia is used to a life of isolation, but when a seemingly innocuous cold case lands in her lap, she's drawn into a conspiracy involving arson, murder, exotic animal smuggling, and, eventually, threats on her life. In a bid to disappear as permanently as the still anonymous owners of the skulls in her studio, Iridia winds up in Vienna, where she attempts to lie low even as she's drawn back into the web of her old profession. Meanwhile, Martin Shusterman just keeps showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Originally from suburban New York, he forges a somewhat aimless cello career that eventually takes him to Buenos Aires, where he lives with his girlfriend, Abril, until she is disappeared, an incidental casualty in Argentina’s Dirty War. Shusterman returns to New York but remains obsessed with his former Buenos Aires neighbor Karl Sauer, a former Nazi propagandist filmmaker in hiding. Shusterman’s search for Sauer brings him to Vienna, where Sauer made his films in the 1930s and '40s. Using information from the septuagenarian daughter of one of Sauer’s leading men, Shusterman is led to the ruins of 39 Nachtfalterallee, the site of Sauer’s former offices, where a much older mystery is being unearthed. On the same site, Unna was the proprietress of a brothel in the last decades of the 1600s. Hardworking and pragmatic, she managed to survive the Ottoman siege and an outbreak of the plague while running a successful house of ill-repute. As the city suffers under the ravages of disease, poverty, and the pressing needs of refugees driven in front of the Ottoman army, Unna’s position becomes ever more tenuous. Iridia’s, Shusterman’s, and Unna’s stories—along with those of a myriad of other characters representative of the sideshows, genocides, and passing obsessions of the last five centuries or so—wind together along the slenderest spindles of happenstance, implausibly but definitively connecting through the ephemera of the objects (and skulls) they leave behind. By the final pages, the reader is simultaneously exhausted by the rigors of exposition-heavy prose and invigorated by the intellectual ambition of the author’s takes on death, time, history, and everything in between.
An ambitious novel written in sometimes overly ambitious prose, this book charms, intrigues, and bewilders.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950539-33-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sweet, sharp, and satisfying.
Their daughter’s wedding stirs up uncomfortable memories for a divorced couple.
The day before the ceremony, the bride’s mother, Gail Baines, second in command at the Ashton School in Baltimore, learns that not only has she been passed over to replace the retiring headmistress, but the new recruit is bringing her deputy with her. The lack of people skills that have cost Gail this promotion are evident even in that initial scene; she’s a classic cranky Tyler protagonist, given to blurting out her opinions with little consideration for others’ feelings. Her first-person narration also reveals her to be touchingly vulnerable, convinced that daughter Debbie, prettier and more polished than she, will inevitably prefer husband-to-be Kenneth’s overbearing, better-off parents. Although her divorce from Max was amicable, Gail considers him a bit of a slacker, and isn’t best pleased when he turns up with a rescue cat in tow and says he has to stay with her because Kenneth is horribly allergic. A startling revelation from Debbie, fresh from her pre-wedding “Day of Beauty,” immediately divides the exes, who have very different opinions about how their daughter should handle this crisis. It also leads to Gail’s revelation of the infidelity that led to their divorce, though not in the way readers might imagine. Laid-back Max is the only fully fleshed character here other than Gail, and the novel is very short, but Tyler’s touch is as delicate, her empathy for human beings and all their quirks as evident in her 25th work of fiction as it was in her first, published an astonishing 60 years ago. Gail’s acerbic observations about the wedding and all its participants, her wistful memories of her odd-couple romance with Max, and her account of their enforced intimacy over the three days surrounding the wedding alternate to poignant effect. The closing pages offer a happy ending that feels true to the characters and utterly deserved.
Sweet, sharp, and satisfying.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803486
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
