A rich, moving saga of people living on the edge, full of plangent defeats and unsung victories.
Residents of a homeless camp fight to head off eviction and shore up their fragile community in Borcyckowski’s luminous novel.
Phibius Emerson is a Black student who was recently expelled from college after he tried to burn his dorm-room furniture—now, he lives in a Sacramento homeless encampment. When he’s on his bipolar meds, he’s a smart, upstanding kid trying to bring some stability and aid to the camp by getting his friends legal assistance and drafting rules on trash and noise. His fellow campers include Lucy, a recently unemployed woman living in her car; William, a man on disability who edges toward a romance with Lucy; Mr. Maxstead, an uncannily nondescript man obsessed with military aircraft; Paul, a 60-something saxophonist who functions well on heroin; Mike and Linda, a couple who barely function at all on meth; Thomas, a Marine vet with PTSD; and Joseph Little Bear, an Indigenous orphan and itinerant street preacher. The campers survive on meager benefit payments, leftovers scrounged from restaurants, and panhandling. Sometimes, they don’t get by: Phibius has a breakdown and gets sent to the psych ward, Linda overdoses, and Mike gets arrested for possession. These disturbances attract the ire of local homeowners who claim the camp poses a danger to a nearby preschool. When the city tries to bulldoze the camp, Phibius fights back with the help of idealistic law student Lin Yang. Meanwhile, campers start drifting away: William and Lucy head north to Mendocino to pursue the dream of starting a marijuana farm, while Joseph wanders down to Bakersfield, walking the highways and hitching rides.
The author takes a deep dive into the lives of his characters, exploring everything from their legal status (Phibius bones up on the niceties of Martin v. City of Boise, a federal court decision that bans cities from evicting the homeless from camps if they are not provided indoor shelter) to their everyday challenges. The meandering narrative unfolds as a set of character studies; some get back on their feet after a bout of bad luck, others stay mired in addiction and mental illnesses, many feel a wariness about forging relationships with other people who may be either judgmental or damaged, and all glean simple pleasures from threadbare circumstances, like an unexpectedly delicious soup-kitchen dinner. Borcyckowski’s subtle, evocative prose delves into his characters’ psychological travails and skillfully orchestrates the tangible details of the camp and its denizens with a blighted lyricism. (“It seemed she was suffering, and her body jolted slightly against Mike’s shoulder as the spasms of tears swept through her; repeatedly, like an insistent wind that blows against you. It blows the papers away and the food wrappers around you away and the note you made about tomorrow; where you were going tomorrow, all of them gone. Forever.”) The result is a vivid and captivating yarn that reveals the offbeat humanity of this most marginalized group.
A rich, moving saga of people living on the edge, full of plangent defeats and unsung victories.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781962624978
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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