A dreamy, heavily stylized retelling of a very old story.
In Sapienza’s folkloric debut novel, an orphaned teenager raised by a priest is confronted by the reappearance of her Russian mother.
Fifteen-year-old Elena resides in the attic of the onion-domed Our Lady of Sorrows church in San Francisco, where her mother left her as a baby (for reasons unknown to Elena) to be raised by a kindly priest known as Father Al. Instead of attending public school, Elena receives tutoring six days a week from Baba Vera, an old, witchlike woman whose pedagogy takes the form of unending housework. “You are special,” Father Al told Elena long ago when she asked why she didn’t go to school with other kids in the neighborhood, adding, “You are meant to study with Baba until she fulfills her plan.” Elena’s only friends are her childhood doll, Kukla, and the beautiful Vasilisa, the girl’s imaginary companion. Then two new people unexpectedly enter her life. One is Anya Prokioff, a Russian woman who arrives in town and claims to be Elena’s mother, though Father Al seems suspicious. The other is Frank Hudson, a friendly young taxicab driver who worries for Elena’s safety. Over the course of this novel, Sapienza’s prose has a fablelike quality; sometimes it relates gauzy scenes, and other times it tells bloody tales, as when Elena butchers a duck for Baba Vera: “She easily removes the gizzards, heart, and liver. Baba loves these parts too. Maybe they will go into a stew, but Baba has also been known to eat them raw. Elena thinks of what Baba said yesterday: ‘To cook, you must kill.’ ” Although the work is ostensibly set in the modern day, Sapienza does little to update the well-known Russian folktale at its heart. No one talks or acts in a manner that modern readers will recognize; indeed, it could easily have been set in medieval Russia with few changes. Fans of fairy tales may enjoy this offbeat retelling, but those expecting a contemporary novel may find themselves befuddled.
A dreamy, heavily stylized retelling of a very old story.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781647425036
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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