Matthew Jackson

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

A lyrical new historical saga

Review by Matthew Jackson

Great historical novels make you feel that you’re immersed in the periods they’re set in. The best ones can make you see it, smell it and feel it on your skin. That’s a difficult trick to pull off, which is why so many historical novels have such a narrow but intense focus. The Lost Queen, Signe Pike’s debut novel set in sixth-century Scotland, is the rare historical epic that manages to be truly sweeping and yet always intense and personal—at once a romance, a story of faith, a story of war and a story of family without ever sacrificing one element to focus on another. The romance does not cancel out the palace intrigue, the faith does not cancel out the magic, and the war does not cancel out the intimate moments of discovery and history. It’s all there at once, each element as rich as any other.

The titular lost queen is Languoreth, the twin sister of the man believed to have inspired the legend of Merlin. Beginning with Languoreth as a girl shortly after the death of her mother, the novel follows her—with a beautifully crafted first-person voice—through early womanhood, into motherhood and across a legendary era caught between the old ways and the new.

Languoreth’s narration, coupled with the sense that we get to discover the intrigues and mysteries of her world along with her as she ages, is the key to the novel’s success. Pike strikes the right balance of immersive historical detail and sincere emotional resonance, and it never falters throughout the book. By the end, you feel happily lost in this mist-shrouded place in history, and you only wish you could stay there longer.

Moving, thrilling and ultimately spellbinding, The Lost Queen is perfect for readers of historical fiction like Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, and for lovers of fantasy like Outlander by Diana Gabaldon and The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Great historical novels make you feel that you’re immersed in the periods they’re set in. The best ones can make you see it, smell it and feel it on your skin. That’s a difficult trick to pull off, which is why so many historical novels have such a narrow but intense focus. The Lost Queen, Signe Pike’s debut novel set in sixth-century Scotland, is the rare historical epic that manages to be truly sweeping and yet always intense and personal—at once a romance, a story of faith, a story of war and a story of family without ever sacrificing one element to focus on another. The romance does not cancel out the palace intrigue, the faith does not cancel out the magic, and the war does not cancel out the intimate moments of discovery and history. It’s all there at once, each element as rich as any other.

FictionComic Fiction

A rollicking launch into adulthood

Review by Matthew Jackson

Caitlin Moran has a gift—in both short- and long-form writing, in both fiction and nonfiction—that hits like magic when it lands in the lap of the right reader. It’s a rare, mesmerizing talent to simultaneously move a reader and make them laugh so hard they risk falling out of their chair. In How to Be Famous, Moran’s follow-up to How to Build a Girl, she works that magic again.

Moran reunites readers with Johanna Morrigan, a teenager from the Midlands of England who moves to London to further her music journalism career as Dolly Wilde. Once there, she is swept up in a world of rock stars, comedians, parties and in particular John Kite, a newly famous musician with whom she is madly in love. Though they’re close, her love is not returned at first, and through a series of adventures Dolly becomes convinced that the way to draw John closer to her is to write her own way to stardom and seduce him with the power of her prose. Once she’s resigned to do this, things start to happen quickly for Dolly, and she must learn to deal with fame and infamy while also reaching out for the only person she’s really trying to touch.

How to Be Famous lives or dies based on Moran’s ability to render Dolly as an enchanting, vulnerable and hilarious guide through the mid-1990s London music scene, and Dolly’s charm immediately jumps off the page. Dolly is at once bitingly witty and achingly open, not just to the reader but also to the world she’s trying to find her place in, and it sets a tone that makes you both root for her and anticipate her next misadventure.

That might be enough to carry the novel on its own, but Moran doesn’t stop there. Her ambition, like Dolly’s, is to weave into this tale a kind of feminist manifesto that tackles love and sex, as well as the fine line between girlhood and womanhood. She succeeds throughout but keeps you waiting for the final, unforgettable exclamation point at the book’s hysterical climax.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Caitlin Moran has a gift—in both short- and long-form writing, in both fiction and nonfiction—that hits like magic when it lands in the lap of the right reader. It’s a rare, mesmerizing talent to simultaneously move a reader and make them laugh so hard they risk falling out of their chair. In How to Be Famous, Moran’s follow-up to How to Build a Girl, she works that magic again.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Brother of the Bard

Review by Matthew Jackson

There’s something audacious about fictionalizing even a portion of the life of William Shakespeare. Bernard Cornwell is well versed in historical writing—he’s perhaps the living king of the genre at this point—but this is Shakespeare we’re talking about. It’s intimidating territory, and not every novelist can do it well.

With his usual knack for detail and characterization, Cornwell plunges fearlessly into Shakespearean England for his latest novel. Fools and Mortals follows Richard, William’s brother, as he longs for a career on the London stage. Loyal to his brother, Richard watches as William rises through the ranks of English theater, even as his own career achieves nothing near the same level of success. This tests his loyalty, and things get worse when a manuscript goes missing, casting suspicion on Richard and threatening the lives of everyone around him.

The first thing readers will notice in Fools and Mortals, as they will in Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom, is the voice. Richard tells his own story, and as crafted by Cornwell’s skilled hands, he tells it beautifully. Right away, there’s a sense of the Shakespearean balance of wit and drama. Just as he did with his series of novels on Alfred the Great, Cornwell places us in proximity to history we know and then brushes greater depth and detail into the personal story he’s trying to convey. Readers will long to hear more from Richard and for more details about Elizabethan stagecraft.

If you love historical fiction, Shakespeare, Cornwell’s work or all of the above, Fools and Mortals is a must-read. It’s a riveting novel driven by a distinctive voice that’s sure to hook you.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you love historical fiction, Shakespeare, Cornwell’s work or all of the above, Fools and Mortals is a must-read. It’s a riveting novel driven by a distinctive voice that’s sure to hook you.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Remember me?

Review by Matthew Jackson

Some novelists run the risk of overstaying their welcome, perhaps overwriting due to indulgence in a particular character or scenario. Roddy Doyle (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha) never feels like one of those writers. His stories, from short fiction to novels, are tightly wound coils of energy, humor and insight, waiting to spring on us. Smile is another stellar example of Doyle’s brand of dense, kinetic storytelling. In just over 200 pages, Doyle manages to tell us something startling, funny and strange about the nature of human tragedy and pain.

Smile follows Victor, a recently separated writer living on his own for the first time in years. Victor spends his evenings having a pint at the local pub, until this quiet ritual is interrupted by Fitzpatrick, an obnoxious and seemingly inescapable man who claims they were schoolmates. Victor can’t remember Fitzpatrick, but he can remember his Catholic school days, and suddenly the trauma of what happened there begins trickling back into his mind. As Doyle jumps between past and present, Victor’s life spools out before us, building to a startling realization that shakes him to his core.

Doyle has a particular talent for humor and dialogue, but he also has the rare quality of being able to balance an economy of language with a dense sense of perception. Not a word is wasted here, and there aren’t many to waste. This is a gift, and it’s one Doyle harnesses with particular power in Smile. This drives the book at an almost fever pitch, practically daring you to turn each page and see what kind of incisive character wisdom he’s about to impart next. By the end, even if you think you know what’s coming, you will be dumbstruck by the storytelling prowess at work. Smile is a brief, brilliant, frenzied reading experience that only Roddy Doyle could deliver.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Smile is another stellar example of Roddy Doyle’s brand of dense, kinetic storytelling. In just over 200 pages, Doyle manages to tell us something startling, funny and strange about the nature of human tragedy and pain.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

The family that scares together

Review by Matthew Jackson

Collaborative novels can be tricky propositions, even for writers as accomplished as the father-son duo of Stephen and Owen King. Each author’s stylistic and thematic concerns can stick out in jarring ways, creating a mashup far less seamless than either author perhaps would like. Sleeping Beauties is not one of those novels. In the grand tradition of team-ups like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens and Stephen King’s own The Talisman (with Peter Straub), it is a triumph of two voices blending wonderfully to take us into a dark and all-too-real dream.

All the women in the Appalachian town of Dooling (and around the world) are falling asleep and refusing to wake up. Once sleep takes them, their bodies are covered by a mysterious, fluffy coating, and if they are disturbed, they awaken as homicidal maniacs. This development naturally sows chaos, inciting riots across the nation and sending men into a frenzy. In Dooling, though, there’s something different: Evie, an enigmatic woman with strange abilities, seems unaffected by the sleeping sickness. Some men think she’s a monster, others a savior, but whatever side they take in a world without women, Dooling is transformed into a powder keg.

Sleeping Beauties traffics in some very potent themes, from the obvious question of what an all-male society would devolve into to less obvious concerns like the politics of a women’s prison and the evolution of sexuality during the aging process. None of these issues, though, are dealt with cheaply or crudely. The book wields the best attributes of each author—Stephen’s ability to ratchet up tension, Owen’s wit and their joint gifts for character detail—with a deftness that makes it feel like the work of a single hybrid imagination. In the authors’ hands, the themes and characters of Sleeping Beauties become powerful fictional case studies, holding the mirror up to our own powder keg of a society in unforgettable and often unnerving ways.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Collaborative novels can be tricky propositions, even for writers as accomplished as the father-son duo of Stephen and Owen King. Each author’s stylistic and thematic concerns can stick out in jarring ways, creating a mashup far less seamless than either author perhaps would like. Sleeping Beauties is not one of those novels. In the grand tradition of team-ups like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens and Stephen King’s own The Talisman (with Peter Straub), it is a triumph of two voices blending wonderfully to take us into a dark and all-too-real dream.

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

An epic saga begins

Review by Matthew Jackson

When a book is billed as a historical epic set in ninth-century Norway, with the evocative title The Half-Drowned King, there are certain expectations. A book like that should deliver great deeds by hardened warriors, kings cloaked in furs, great feasts, harrowing sea voyages and brutal battles. With this novel, the first in a promised trilogy, Linnea Hartsuyker delivers all of those historical epic goods. Then, she digs deeper.

In the ninth century, Norway is still a fragmented land ruled by many kings, but a prophecy promises that one king will rise to rule the whole land. That king is Harald, an ambitious young warrior whose name rings through history and Hartsuyker’s narrative. Her heroes are two characters playing smaller roles in this saga of kinghood. Ragnvald, the titular half-drowned warrior, is a man driven by a quest to take back his lands from his domineering stepfather Olaf. Svanhild, his sister, longs for a life beyond Olaf’s farm, a life where she’s not promised to a man she doesn’t wish to marry. Everything changes for them when Ragnvald is nearly murdered in an attempt to wipe away his family’s claim to land and title. As Ragnvald fights for revenge, Svanhild fights for freedom, and both end up at the center of history.

Everything you want from a medieval saga set during this crucial period of Norwegian history is here, from massive battles to honor-fueled duels to rituals and supernatural visions. What sets The Half-Drowned King apart is the way Hartsuyker renders it all. Her tales of great Viking deeds are given all of the epic gravity they require, but the character drama is what makes this novel addictive. In Ragnvald we see the proud warrior beset by vulnerability, self-doubt and moral ambiguity, and in Svanhild we see a powerful spirit longing to break free, discovering her own cunning and intellectual ferocity in the process. As they trade off chapters and the story barrels toward clash after clash, the timelessness of the tale becomes clear. Hartsuyker has captured an era with precise, powerful prose imagery, but she’s also vividly envisioned two enduring characters.

The Half-Drowned King is an essential new novel for fans of the medieval novels of Bernard Cornwell, the character-driven Tudor novels of Hilary Mantel or the violent fury of “Game of Thrones.”

The Half-Drowned King is an essential new novel for fans of the medieval novels of Bernard Cornwell, the character-driven Tudor novels of Hilary Mantel or the violent fury of “Game of Thrones.”

FictionSpeculative FictionFamily SagaComic Fiction

More powers, more problems

Review by Matthew Jackson

Comic novels about dysfunctional families certainly aren’t new. Neither are novels about grifters bound together by blood and larcenous vice. It’s the personalities that make such stories feel fresh, and with Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory has created a captivating cast for a hybrid breed of story. Told from multiple points of view and leaping between past and present, it’s a hilarious portrayal of family, schemes and a few superpowers thrown in along the way.

Once upon a time, the Telemachus clan was on the verge of greatness, wowing audiences with claims of clairvoyance and telekinesis. Though the patriarch, Teddy, was merely a very skilled con man, the family had a secret weapon: The matriarch, Maureen, was an actual psychic so powerful that even the government made use of her skills. Then Maureen died, and the family’s dreams seemed to die with her.

In the present day, the Telemachuses are fragmented and defeated. Teddy tries his old moves on new women. His daughter, Irene, looks for excitement in her dull life, while her brother Frankie sells supplements and her other brother, Buddy—who has mysterious gifts of his own—constantly invents new projects as he picks apart the family home. A ray of light enters their lives when, in a moment of pubescent heat, Irene’s son, Matty, learns he has a genuine psychic gift of his own.

Despite its fantastical premise, the real power of Gregory’s novel is in his ability to pivot between several fully realized points of view with each passing chapter. The disappointment at having to leave one fascinating Telemachus behind is exceeded only by the delight in finding the next Telemachus to be just as complex, funny and genuine. These are eccentric people with eccentric lives, but the level of emotional detail at work is astounding, and Gregory’s magic touch makes even their strangest moments relatable.

These characters’ gifts merge with a brisk pace and a subtle, often bittersweet sense of comedy to make Spoonbenders an intensely endearing read. The premise will hook you, the plot will entice you, and then the Telemachuses themselves will make you fall in love.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Comic novels about dysfunctional families certainly aren’t new. Neither are novels about grifters bound together by blood and larcenous vice. It’s the personalities that make such stories feel fresh, and with Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory has created a captivating cast for a hybrid breed of story. Told from multiple points of view and leaping between past and present, it’s a hilarious portrayal of family, schemes and a few superpowers thrown in along the way.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Alice Network

Review by Matthew Jackson

Historical fiction is all about blending the original with the familiar, about those delicate new stitches woven into the tapestry. The best practitioners of this often subtle art can sew those new threads without ever breaking the pattern, until the new and the old, the real and the fictional, are one and the same. With her latest novel, Kate Quinn announces herself as one of the best artists of the genre.

The Alice Network jumps deftly and briskly between two tumultuous periods of European history: 1947, in the wake of the second world war; and 1915, in the heat of the first. After World War II, Charlie St. Clair—a young American woman being shuffled off to Europe by her family due to a surprise pregnancy—is searching for her lost French cousin, and her quest leads her to the London doorstep of a prickly, drunken woman named Eve Gardiner.

In 1915, a much younger Eve is working as a file girl for the war effort when her multilingual skills and ability to go unnoticed (helped by her stammer) earn her the opportunity to work as a spy in German-occupied France. Eve wants to be on the front lines, but she may be unprepared for how far she’ll have to go.

Quinn’s novel links the two women across time, as it becomes clear that something from Eve’s dark past lingers in Charlie’s present. The plotting is seamless, the pace breathtaking, and the prose is both vivid and laced with just the right amount of detail. Charlie is a fiercely entertaining narrator, and Eve is one of the most complex and rewarding characters you’ll find in a new novel this year.

Fans of historical fiction, spy fiction and thrilling drama will love every moment of The Alice Network. It’s a masterful novel that will leave you craving more.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The story of a spy
Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

A failed journalist confronts the secrets of her past

Review by Matthew Jackson

Dennis Lehane has a gift for discerning beautiful ruins amid the shattered lives of his characters. He has bewitched us with this cutting spell in novel after novel, from Gone, Baby, Gone to Shutter Island. With Since We Fell, he’s done it again, weaving a piercing thriller out of secrets, paranoia and what life can become when darkness is the only thing that stirs you anymore.

Rachel Childs grew up surrounded by the secrets of her mother, and so she grew obsessed with the truth. When that pursuit of truth led to a successful journalism career, an on-air panic attack tanked it, rendering her a virtual shut-in until she found a husband who could stabilize her life with love and seemingly supernatural understanding. Just as Rachel is beginning to find her footing again, a chance sighting on a Boston street shatters everything she thought she knew about her life, sending her into a web of secrets that even her powerful journalistic mind couldn’t prepare her for.

The right storyteller can forge trust with readers, a bond that allows the tale to go anywhere. Lehane wields that talent masterfully. His confident, precise prose makes you lean in until you want nothing more than to know his heroine completely, only to be surprised as the thriller trap snaps shut.

With Since We Fell, Lehane further cements his reputation as one of our finest crime writers, forging an unforgettable character and then driving her deep into page-turning thriller territory with the deft hand of an old master. This novel will please longtime Lehane fans and new readers alike, leaving them wanting more of his beautiful darkness.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Dennis Lehane has a gift for discerning beautiful ruins amid the shattered lives of his characters. He has bewitched us with this cutting spell in novel after novel, from Gone, Baby, Gone to Shutter Island. With Since We Fell, he’s done it again, weaving a…
FictionDebut Fiction

A wild journey to reclaim a lost bride

Review by Matthew Jackson

There is a tendency among debut novelists, particularly debut novelists who gravitate to the trappings of genre fiction, to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Debut novels are very often grand, massive works of tremendous ambition that achieve a great many things but don’t achieve any of them all that well. You can get an epistolary tale of magic realism involving space pirates and lizard monsters and a bunch of Shakespeare references to boot, but none of it ever really gives you a clear sense of voice.

That’s not the case with The Gentleman, the endlessly clever debut from Forrest Leo. This novel weaves together a brilliant sense of voice, a classic comedic touch that’s as potent as it is gentle, and a group of characters that could just as easily exist in a “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” sketch as they could in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. With his first book, Leo delivers us a story that’s entertaining on about a dozen different levels, and he does it with a sense of joy that imbues his often self-serious narrator with a quality that makes every page lovable.

The narrator is Lionel Savage, a popular poet who, despite his success, is going broke. So, in search of financial salvation, he marries Vivien Lancaster, a woman of tremendous notoriety and wealth. It seems like a good idea at the time, but suddenly Lionel finds himself unable to write, and, in a moment of recklessness, accidentally sells his wife to a Gentleman at a party who just happens to be the Devil himself. In an effort to reclaim her, Lionel must venture out with Vivien’s dashing adventurer brother, his butler, an inventor, a bookseller and his often wild sister.

If that all sounds very outlandish to you, that’s because it is, but Leo delivers it all in a way that’s endlessly brisk, charming, and most importantly, clever. Savage’s narration is a series of quips in and of itself, punctuated by footnotes and highlighted by everything from jokes about the present tense to an exchange in which it’s made clear that The Devil doesn’t really like it when people call his home “Hell.” This is a novel propelled by voice, but the voice alone isn’t enough, so Leo bolsters it all with a wickedly funny plot and a series of characters who seem both wholly original yet clearly carved out of the page of a thumping good potboiler. It’s a marriage of old and new that’s never tiring, and it makes for a delightful page-turner.

Debut novels are very often grand, massive works of tremendous ambition that achieve a great many things but don’t achieve any of them all that well. This isn't the case for this rollicking debut.
FictionHorrorDebut Fiction

Ghostly secrets along a foreboding coast

Review by Matthew Jackson

In his thoroughly engrossing debut novel, British writer Andrew Michael Hurley provides a chilling masterclass in gothic suspense.

Hurley’s protagonist is Tonto Smith, a man haunted by long-ago events on an Easter trip to “The Loney,” a desolate spot of coastline in Lancashire. Smith’s family, and their fellow parishioners, are confident that a shrine near the Loney will help Smith’s mute brother, Hanny, and make yearly trips there in the 1970s—but darker things are afoot. Decades later, another sinister event occurs at The Loney, and Smith is forced to revisit his past.

A bestseller in the U.K., The Loney has drawn comparisons to authors like Shirley Jackson and Sarah Waters, and the seductive and deliciously dangerous sense of place Hurley establishes does evoke these writers. The Loney is a perilous place that literally seems to swallow everything that comes near it, and it hovers over the novel like a ghost. In addition, the spot feels tactile in an organic, powerful way, from a floorboard that hides old treasure to a forest that reveals the darkest secrets of the Lancashire coast. With a breathtaking mixture of effortlessly evocative prose and authentic character moments, The Loney is an immersive story that will make you hope, and fear, along with every character. The Loney is a novel of innocence lost—a brooding, beautifully composed saga that will chill you to your bones.

In his thoroughly engrossing debut novel, British writer Andrew Michael Hurley provides a chilling masterclass in gothic suspense.
NonfictionArts & Culture

A glimpse behind the curtain of a Broadway phenomenon

Review by Matthew Jackson

At the beginning of Hamilton: The Revolution, theater critic and co-author Jeremy McCarter describes the moment he first heard Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pitch for what was, at the time, a concept album about the life and times of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. The book ends (spoiler alert for those of you who don’t read the news) with President Barack Obama addressing an audience at the end of a performance. If you’ve watched Hamilton’s rise from improbable idea to impossible hit, this progression will not be surprising. What’s great about Hamilton: The Revolution isn’t its destination. It’s the way it chronicles a distinctive creative journey.

Hamilton: The Revolution is, in itself, a beautiful object. Miranda himself christened it the “Hamiltome,” and it is the kind of gorgeous book you can proudly display in your living room. Musical theater is a combination of song, dance and story, and this book fittingly mirrors that with its combination of memoir, journalism and gorgeous still photography. Designers Paul Kepple and Max Vandenberg do a masterful job blending McCarter’s journalism and Miranda’s musical annotations with artful cast photographs by Josh Lehrer, who contributed images taken with one of the oldest camera lenses in existence.

With a pop culture phenomenon as big as Hamilton, it would be easy for the authors to give in to navel-gazing, and while the book does contain its fair share of creative reflection, Miranda—who just won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the play—never gives in to making it all about himself. He happily reminisces about the moments when particular songs were conceived (he dreamed up “Wait For It,” one of the show’s centerpieces, while on a train on his way to a birthday party) and reveals what was in his head during certain lyrical cornerstones, but it’s not about Miranda. It’s about the show. The book details with great love the contributions of everyone from director Thomas Kail and musical director Alex Lacamoire to Miranda’s co-stars like Leslie Odom Jr. (Aaron Burr), Christopher Jackson (George Washington), Phillipa Soo (Eliza Schuyler Hamilton), and the list goes on.

The end result is a book that presents a full-throated celebration of the collaborative process. Hamilton: The Revolution provides insight into not only the logistical side of such an achievement, but also the emotional side. It’s no accident that this book is subtitled “The Revolution.” Sure, it’s an amusing American history pun, but it’s also a declaration of intent from Miranda and McCarter. They want to tell you the story of how something that’s changed musical theater also changed them. At its heart, the book is about how everyone who participated in this story was personally revolutionized, and that makes it something more than fascinating. It makes it moving. 

This beautifully illustrated companion to Broadway's smash of the century will leave Hamilton fans completely satisfied.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Jumping through time in Guatemala

Review by Matthew Jackson

A multigenerational, multi-viewpoint tale that’s a meditation on everything from history to cultural context to personal strife, Kelly Kerney’s second novel is an adept meditation on the weight of history.

Hard Red Spring takes place in four different time periods over the course of nearly a century, all focused in some way on the history and culture of Guatemala—and on the 1902 disappearance of a young girl, who watches her family’s prospects get ripped to shreds. In 1954, the wife of the American ambassador to Guatemala enters into an affair that drives her to distraction. In 1983, a pair of missionaries get more than they bargained for, and their very faith is rattled. And finally, in 1999, a mother returns to her adopted daughter’s home country in the hope of learning about her child’s heritage and rekindling an old flame. All of these narrative threads are tied together by plot, as well as thematic resonance: These are all people in over their heads.

The novel begins with the 1902 storyline. Evie is American, but she’s obsessed with the mythology of her adoptive Guatemalan home, even attempting to snatch a doll left at a makeshift altar inside a cave near her home. We all like to hope that we’re going to glimpse something mystical in another culture, and in Evie we see that same curiosity. Kerney puts readers into the place of her characters, as they peer into a culture they may not ever understand. Interweaving stories of love, loss and confusion with beautiful prose and pacing, Hard Red Spring will pull readers through page after page.

A multigenerational, multi-viewpoint tale that’s a meditation on everything from history to cultural context to personal strife, Kelly Kerney’s second novel is an adept meditation on the weight of history.

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