A surprising, vibrant final novel from a legendary Southern writer.
An unsupervised boy comes of age in 1940s Tennessee in Gay’s final posthumous novel.
Yates gives new meaning to the term hardscrabble childhood. One winter night, he wakes up to the sound of a wagon—“Sany Claus?” he thinks—but it’s just a man dropping off the corpse of Yates’ father, whom he was forced to shoot for stealing meat. “I aimed to fire over his head but he’s a purty tall feller,” the man explains. Yates’ mother is tubercular, and she pays for her medicine—and whatever else she requires—with sex. The surrounding community is hardly more nurturing. Yates once watched through the slats of a boxcar while one man murdered another with a shotgun. He’s involved in a long-standing feud with the local bootlegger, Granny Stovall, which started when he hit her with a shovel after he attempted to steal back a dead goat that once belonged to him. A rare role model is a Black miner named Crowe, who takes an interest in the boy and helps him purchase a knife with a stag’s head etched on the blade that Yates has long been eying. When Crowe is sidelined by a mining accident, Yates visits the man during his recovery and learns some of the miner’s hard-won knowledge. Left mostly to fend for himself, Yates spends his time hopping trains, sneaking into circuses, stealing chickens, and romancing Granny Stovall’s granddaughter. But the violence of his environment comes for everyone eventually, and it isn’t long before Yates finds himself caught up in it. “All these acts of violence seemed random,” he observes early in the novel, “but already he divined something unseen moving beneath the surface, bones and blood and nerves beneath the skin.” What sort of man will this boy turn out to be?
Gay is a master of his own brand of woodsy lyricism, mixing the colorful vernacular of his characters with deceptively elegant descriptions: “The train went on into the falling night past farmers and past rich fields heavy with corn, past weary sharecroppers who’d let night fall on them leading their mules from the darkening fields, past leaning clapboard shanties yellowlit against whatever prowled out there in the darkness.” The novel is episodic in its structure, which may have to do with the fact that it was assembled from Gay’s notebooks by a team of his friends (who have already added three other posthumous works to the author’s oeuvre). It will likely be viewed as a minor entry in the Gay canon, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fascinating read, in part because it riffs so directly on Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which were apparently foundational to Gay’s reading life. (As Tom and Huck witness their own funeral from the rafters, Yates peeps on the widow who takes him in while she’s bathing…and promptly crashes through the ceiling.) Despite its structural flaws, the writing always sings, and given this is the last of Gay’s unpublished novels, the reader will want to savor every word.
A surprising, vibrant final novel from a legendary Southern writer.Pub Date: June 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60-489273-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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