Absolutely stunning.
A collection of narratives focusing on the dark side of Veracruz.
“To live in a city is to live among stories,” Mexican author Melchor writes in her latest book to be translated into English. But what does she mean by stories? The accounts in the collection—“relatos,” she calls them, or “tales”—are based on real events, she writes, but “have no journalistic claims because they don’t include accurate dates, hard facts or car registration plates…but nor can they be called realist fiction.” Whatever they’re called, they’re extraordinary, each one a portrait of life in Veracruz in the past decades. In “Queen, Slave, Woman,” Melchor tells the story of Evangelina Tejera Bosada, a former queen of Veracruz’s annual Carnival who bludgeoned her sons to death, dismembered them, and placed the remains in a pot on her balcony. Melchor’s observations about the case are fascinating; she writes about the dissonance between Tejera Bosada’s former image as a beloved Carnival queen and her image after the slayings as a coldblooded killer: “Opposing yet complementary archetypes, masks that dehumanize flesh and blood women and become blank screens on which to project the desires, fears, and anxieties of a society that professes to be an enclave of tropical sensualism but deep down is profoundly conservative, classist, and misogynist.” In “The House on El Estero,” Melchor recounts a story told to her by a former partner who visited a supposedly haunted house years before and claims to have come face to face with the devil. Her ex’s story itself is indeed terrifying, but Melchor turns it into a fascinating reflection on the nature of narrative itself. The collection closes with “Veracruz With a Zee for Zeta,” a wrenching story, told in the second person, about the experience of a person who witnesses violence connected to the Los Zetas cartel. The last two paragraphs are a gut punch, some of the most wrenching prose to come around in years. Skillfully translated by Hughes, this is a book that’s as gorgeous as it is dark, and it proves that Melchor is one of the finest writers working today.
Absolutely stunning.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780811228053
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.
A woman faces a health crisis and obsesses over a local accident in this wonderful follow-up to Sandwich (2024).
Newman begins her latest with a quote from Nora Ephron: “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know—it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.” It sets an appropriate tone for a story that is just as full of death and dread as it is laughter. Two years after the events of Sandwich, Rocky is back home in Western Massachusetts and happily surrounded by family—her daughter, Willa, lives with her and her husband, Nick, while applying to Ph.D. programs; her widowed father, Mort, has moved into the in-law apartment behind their house. When a young man who graduated from high school with Rocky’s son, Jamie, is hit by a train, Rocky finds herself spiraling as she thinks about how close the tragedy came to her own family. She’s also freaking out about a mysterious rash her dermatologist can’t explain. Both instances are tailor-made for internet research and stalking. As Rocky obsessively googles her symptoms and finds only bad news (“Here’s what’s true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don’t write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!”), she also compulsively checks the Facebook page of the accident victim’s mother. Newman excels at showing how sorrow and joy coexist in everyday life. She masterfully balances a modern exploration of grief with truly laugh-out-loud lines (one passage about the absurdity of collecting a stool sample and delivering it to the doctor stands out). As Rocky deals with the byzantine frustrations of the medical system, she also has to learn, once more, how to see her children, husband, father, and herself as fully flawed and lovable humans.
A heartbreaking, laugh-provoking, and absolutely Ephron-esque look at the beauty and fragility of everyday life.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063453913
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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