A fascinating immersion into a little-known world, written with tenderness and humanity.
An aging faith healer recounts practicing her calling amid gender-based violence, loss, celebrity, and murder in Mexican author Lozano's second novel to appear in English.
In Feliciana's poor, hardworking family, the gift of healing is passed from fathers to sons, not daughters. It's her cousin Paloma who teaches her the art, shot through with Christian faith, and the herbs and mushrooms to use. Born male, Paloma is Muxe—a third gender accepted among the Zapotec people since pre-colonial times. Once she began to identify this way, changed her name, and began to sleep with men, she gave up being a curandero and began to train Feliciana, who goes on to achieve worldwide renown. Narrated from the alternating points of view of Feliciana and Zoe, a journalist who's interviewing her, the stories weave around both women's struggles to find their voices and make their own ways. Feliciana endures a hardscrabble childhood and an alcoholic husband, then other people's jealousy at her success. Zoe grieves her late father and deferred dreams. But the most vibrant character is Paloma, whose murder is reported in the first sentence. Earlier, having been beaten for being Muxe and left with a scar on her face, she wore a brooch to call attention to it: "We don’t hide our scars, we show them off." As in Loop (2021), Lozano eschews traditional narrative for the discursive pleasures of voice. "Paloma once said to me, she said, Feliciana, love, shaman, curandera, witch, those words are all too small for you because yours is the Language, you are the curandera of the Language, and yours too is the Book. And Paloma also said once, Feliciana, love, it’s not always necessary to cure mankind because men aren’t always ill, but men are always necessary and good for what ails the Muxe in me, dear." A sensitive, informative translator's note explains that Feliciana is loosely based on a Oaxacan curandera internationally famous in the 1950s and '60s.
A fascinating immersion into a little-known world, written with tenderness and humanity.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64622-068-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
© 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.
