A fictional tragedy evoked with such clarity and specificity that it will linger in your memory as if it really happened.
In a Vietnamese immigrant community in Sydney, Australia, a woman investigates her teenage brother's murder.
The troubles in 1990s Cabramatta are many. The North and South Vietnamese people who came to the area as refugees after the war are deeply marked by the horrors they experienced, and they are inflicting their damage on the first-generation Australians who are their children. Lien's debut communicates the specific operation of generational trauma with nuance and insight. The psychological predicament of the families she writes about is exacerbated by Cabramatta's heroin epidemic and institutionalized anti-Asian racism among the "blondies" of White Australia. Between these two factors, when 17-year-old Denny Tran is beaten to death after Cabramatta High School's senior formal, the police show little interest in finding the murderer. Denny must have been a junkie or in a gang, they assume. And since everyone who was at the popular banquet hall where it happened, including the boy's best friends and one of his teachers, claims to have been in the bathroom and seen nothing, there's no reason for them to think otherwise. His older sister, Ky, returns from her newspaper job in Melbourne to attend the funeral and ends up staying on in shock and outrage to find the truth of what happened. Her brother was no junkie or gang member: A sweet, kind, funny, almost perfect boy, he died with the "Most Likely To Succeed" award he had just won in his pocket. Her investigation will take her back into her and her brother's shared past, particularly her friendship with Minh Le—Minnie—who long ago went from beloved best friend to stranger. If Lien goes a bit too far in carrying out the mission of the book's title, giving more emotional accounting and exposition in dialogue than is ideal, this book is nonetheless memorable and powerful.
A fictional tragedy evoked with such clarity and specificity that it will linger in your memory as if it really happened.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-322773-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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