Heartbreakingly moving in its simplicity.
While searching for his own destiny, a dog changes the lives of lost souls.
In the wake of a tsunami in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, Kazumasa Nakagaki—a young man working as a delivery driver/getaway car operator—finds a stray dog politely waiting outside a convenience store. From the dog’s collar, Kazumasa learns that his name is Tamon and assumes that this is short for Tamonten, a Japanese guardian deity. And that is exactly what Tamon becomes for Kazumasa and many others throughout the novel: a guardian angel. Tamon protects Kazumasa as he carries out his illicit activities and tries to make money to support his family. Tamon brings joy to Kazumasa’s sister and his ailing mother, whose dementia leads her to believe that Tamon is her childhood dog (a pattern throughout as others associate Tamon with dogs from their pasts). But Kazumasa knows that Tamon, who is constantly and mysteriously turning to look toward the southwest, is not fated to stay with him, and when circumstances drag them apart, Tamon continues on his journey. In a story told in episodic vignettes, Tamon becomes the companion of a criminal, a wife with a deadbeat husband, a sex worker with a dark secret, and, perhaps most poignantly, an old man dying of cancer. Hase’s last vignette finds Tamon with a young boy whose early years have been marked by deep trauma. Hase’s staccato sentences and straightforward narrative structure should not be mistaken for shallowness. And while some stories are more affecting than others (“The Couple and the Dog” feels slightly awkward in its narrative arc), Hase’s novel is ultimately a touching meditation on shining lights in the face of trauma and hopelessness: “It’s your dog magic, I suppose. Dogs don’t just make people smile. They give us love and courage, too, just from being at our side.”
Heartbreakingly moving in its simplicity.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-59-330041-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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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