An intriguing but emotionally shallow picaresque about an invisible man.
A man finds invisibility much better and much worse than he could ever have imagined in this literary novel.
Freelance writer Charlie Cain is suffering from a pain in his lower back. He’s reluctant to go to the doctor—both because he has no health insurance and because his girlfriend, Amber Dressing, recently left him for a physician—but the discomfort becomes more than he can bear. On the recommendation of an acquaintance, he sees a very unconventional medic who prescribes him a vial of drops, one to be taken under the tongue with each meal. Charlie starts right away, and, by the next day, the pain has started to disappear. Unfortunately, there is a pretty severe side effect: “It was then that he saw something anomalous about his hands and forearms. They were—almost transparent. They flickered like an old film and seemed lit by a lemony inner light. He shook one and it was flesh and then not-flesh, flesh and then not-flesh.” Charlie immediately starts enjoying his invisibility: running around naked, rooting through his friend’s house, spying on his attractive neighbor while she’s undressed. When he goes back to the doctor to figure out what happened, the office has closed, as if it were never there. Freshly uninhibited, Charlie embarks on a new life as a burglar, prankster, and voyeur. He becomes obsessed with an agoraphobic painter still mourning her dead husband and begins an affair with a New Age priestess who thinks he’s a god. But soon people will start to realize Charlie is missing. And it’s only a matter of time before he decides to use his new ability to try to win Amber back.
The novel is told with a fair bit of ironic distance—the characters have not-quite-real names like Sudie Nimm and Patience Spent—which keeps readers from asking too many questions about the how and why of things. Mesler’s imagery is often surprising, as here in his description of a man at a Neighborhood Watch meeting where Charlie’s crime spree is discussed (Charlie, of course, is present as well): “The police officer who attended was named Peter Natural. He was a large, Aryan fellow, as handsome as a coat of mail. His leather gleamed. His revolver looked as big as canned ham.” The author’s prose can also be a bit too cute, as here where he describes one of Charlie’s lovers’ nether regions: “Her furze bush was black as sloe and thick like a thicket.” It’s an unexpectedly raunchy tale. A startling number of women want to have sex with this unknown invisible man—even on a city bus—and Charlie is more than happy to comply. Disappointingly, the female characters are quite flat and primarily exist as objects of Charlie’s desire. Readers will be left wishing that the story had tried a bit harder to be about something more than male fantasies. Invisibility is a fertile and well-explored concept in fiction, yet Mesler doesn’t actually find much to say about it.
An intriguing but emotionally shallow picaresque about an invisible man.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60-489281-9
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
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