The times may change but the stories remain the same in this ambitious, eclectic collection.
Timeless spins on classic Greek myths.
These stories generally begin in media res, leaving the reader to puzzle along with the characters over just what's going on. The protagonist is often given no name, and the context and circumstances are unclear—as is the border between the natural and supernatural. Time itself is apparently an illusion, a construct. Can the narrator be trusted? The narrator’s world? Yet through the accretion of detail the story begins to cohere, often in the manner of a fairy tale or parable, offering a moral that is both instructive and unsettling. “He is drifting a long way from the shore on some dark, interior sea,” describes the plight of the protagonist of “The Quiet Limit of the World,” one of the longest and most expansive tales, apparently covering centuries. Its epigraph invokes Tithonus, the human lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn. Her father (Zeus, presumably) has granted the protagonist immortality, though nobody mentioned eternal youth, so the protagonist is sentenced to wither away without end. "You are going to spend a long time with a very old man. Or you are going to leave him," the father says with a laugh. Many of the stories lack any sort of resolution, making them seem all the more existential. There’s a sense that they exist outside of time, that they have been repeating themselves forever, and will continue to do so, even as the gods of classic myth have given way to science and technology (as in the experimental gene-editing facility of “The Wilderness”). “My Old School” is an outlier here, more a story of contemporary realism than recast myth, yet also offering a moral for its untrustworthy narrator. The author seems to be toying with the essence of storytelling, the way that it has persevered and sustained itself through the ages. “The decades spin past,” he writes. “The blur of dragonfly wings.”
The times may change but the stories remain the same in this ambitious, eclectic collection.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550864
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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