OF LOSS AND LAVENDER: A Novel, masculinity's vast void after destruction

OF LOSS AND LAVENDER: A Novel
SINAN ANTOON
Other Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebbok, preorder now for delivery on 17 March 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this achingly beautiful novel of trauma, memory, and identity, two Iraqi men struggle to start a new life in the US after the Gulf War.

Sami, a retired doctor, lives with his son and grandchildren in Brooklyn. As he tries to navigate this new city, it becomes increasingly clear he is losing his memory due to dementia. Every day he sinks deeper into old memories of a life in Iraq before the war.

Omar arrived in the US with no family. He has run away from Iraq with a fake identity. As a deserter, he was punished by having an ear cut off. In Baghdad, this is an unmissable mark of shame. Omar works menial jobs, creates a new identity—comically passing as Puerto Rican—and dreams of reconstructive surgery to get his ear, and his dignity, back.

Their stories converge powerfully when it becomes clear they were connected in Iraq at a moment that was pivotal for them both. Deftly exploring the aftermath of war and relocation, Of Loss and Lavender creates a moving portrait of life in exile.

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My Review: A novel of displacement. A story of male identity that, in centering differing...often competing...cultural notions of masculinity, shines a klieg light into the endless void at men's cores left by their "failures," inabilities, unwillingness to live measured by that toxic measure.

What Author Antoon did by bringing these oddly assorted immigrants to the US was subtle, clever, and tendentious. Omar is a chancer. He's blagged his way into and out of trouble since...well, who knows, we're not vouchsafed his whole life's story but I'd bet my very own United States dollars that he's been behaving this way his whole life. Omar is running even when he stands still, never at rest because rest is the point when "They" can get you in their sights to pin you in your place, the one "They" have decided you belong.

Sami's never run in his life. Towards or away from a goal or a problem, he's been steady. His aging mind has fractured from the weight of his memories. He's not agile, he's strong. Strength, unlike agility, breaks when overextended. He tries to comprehend Brooklyn, not an easy task for the native from the US, and fails. In his failure to become a Brooklynite, Sami becomes the dependent he was always responsible for, the helpless and confused neophyte he always guided...the not-powerful responsibilty in place of a lifetime as the powerful protector. Wandering in his memories he needs to build his identity Sami has no traction thanks to dementia. We meet him before the dementia robs him of enough capacity to know he's losing his battle. It is the hardest to endure of all dementia's thieveries. Sami is still Sami. Cruel is our word for this moment of struggle, outsiders who observe it; internally, no one who knows it intimately has ever told us, because they can't.

When you use these men as each others' counterpoise you get the fulcrum of the system located at masculinity. Lost, found, rejected, but "Achilles absent was Achilles still," in Homer's distillation of verity into aperçu. In bringing these wounded-by-past-lives souls to a country that shares none of their lived experiences, Author Antoon removes all the props we use to build identity from them. They have no obvious place in the cultural map they must now use to navigate Life. Omar loves this because it means he controls his narrative, he has no further need to resist the boxes he's forced to occupy because they don't exist to threaten him. It's liberation, yes, but it comes as always at a price. Belonging, the sense of purpose that it grants, is also in those boxes that confine, shape, define Omar (including his name, fictional though it is). Freedom isn't free. Never has that truth been more stark than to Omar in Brooklyn.

Living your life in translation is never easy. It is a hidden cost of Othering those not deemed "mainstream" or those who are immigrants in similar degrees. Author Antoon is an iraqi immigrant to New York, a novelist and (it says in his biography) poet who translates from (and/or to) Arabic; It shows in this very good novel. It feels like he is translating the experience of masculinity from one culture to another, like the characters are finding ways to make sense of the world that use words no longer part of their fluency. Sami's losses are structural intrinsic; Omar's are voluntary, elective; both are costly and exact significant emotional tolls on each man's journey through the maze of Brooklyn.

As a professor at New York University, Author Antoon is no doubt drawing on his own immigrant experience in the vast, bewildering social system of New York. I hope the world here has treated him with greater kindness than either of these characters received. I offer the story an incomplete fifth star because I was immersed in the flume of the story's canal, the high-pressure constriction that roils and directs but does not deliver to an end point the narrative waters. What, in the end, did Omar and Sami do as a result of occupying the same canal? They changed; but in tandem not in response to each other.

I derived a lot of pleasure from the story. I hope y'all will give it your time and treasure. I think the way each character experienced their quest after identity was so poignantly masculine, so painfully rooted in their manhood, that many women would get significant value from this male interiority.

WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES, New Adult coming-of-age novel

WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES
BRIAN ZEPKA
Pennor Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
99¢ ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Eighteen-year-old Stetson Delancey never thought breaking up with his boyfriend would turn him invisible.

In Penango County, Pennsylvania, high school couples carve their names into the legendary Ardor Tree, a rite of passage said to grant love that lasts. Stetson and his boyfriend were no exception. But a bitter breakup just before college splinters their future, and in a moment of anger, Stetson does the unthinkable: he hacks their names from the tree.

That’s when everything in his rural hometown goes from boring to bizarre. Shadows flicker where they shouldn’t. Strangers pass by like he’s not even there. And some people stop seeing him altogether.

With just two months left in Penango and his college dream slipping away, Stetson races to uncover the tree’s secrets before he vanishes for good. But when he meets a boy only he can see—a boy who may have secrets of his own—Stetson begins to wonder if breaking free from his hometown means letting go of everything or learning to hold on to what matters.

WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES is a queer coming-of-age novel about the unraveling of first love, hometown magic, and how sometimes we can’t uncover the truth about others without confronting the truth about ourselves.

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My Review: Stetson's a queer kid at the inflection point between ending the perspectiveless wasteland of adolescence and taking on the habituation to and of emotional regulation that we call "young adulthood." At eighteen, he knows when he fucks up there'll be consequences; sometimes he just doesn't much care. This is where we meet him.

What happens to start Stetson on his path to maturity is not revealed until about two-thirds of the way into the story...bye now, fifth star...while he very thoroughly trashes his now-ex boyfriend (of two years, at eighteen) in the vaguest most undefendable terms. It's clear Precious is a Major Drama Queen. He's got his BFF Whitley (I mentally called her the most patient girl in the world because she never snapped on this inconsiderate chud despite how often he simply ghosted her, used her as ears to whine into, etc.) as his captive audience for obsessively overthinking all the weird stuff that's happening to him. It's not 100% clear to me the supernatural implications of Stetson becoming invisible to Murray, the ex, and his sudden ability to "see" the long-missing Xander were real or simply the intense fantastical overdescriptions of Stetson's wounded spirit.

What I want to praise is the evocation of how domestic violence becomes normalized within a relationship. If you screw up, like Stetson did with his big dramatic announcement to Murray, and your partner's response is what Murray's was, you're going to need to consider an exit strategy. Props to Author Zepka for making this a point, though why wait so long to bring it up?

I'm generally positive about the read, though more for teens than readers in my age bracket. As the author's already in the YA market, I'm supposing this is more aimed at "New Adults" (a kind of reader I characterize as "YA with pubic hair"). It's still not on my top-ten list but I'm not the marketed-to reader. I'd prefer a story with much better female representation, the sweet, patient BFF is in short supply in the real world; but that's me being an old guy with multiple axes that need grinding. I'd buy it for my grandkid who's navigating a new relationship territory. If they asked for it.

THE IRON GARDEN SUTRA, The Cosmic Wheel series book one

THE IRON GARDEN SUTRA (The Cosmic Wheel #1)
A.D. SUI
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical murder mystery, as a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding.

Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy and guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the comfort he wants to believe he brings to the dead, his relationships with his fellow Vessels are distant at best, leaving him reliant on his AI construct for companionship.

The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years. A relic of Earth’s dying past, humanity took the ship to the stars on a multi-generation journey to find another habitable planet yet never reached its destination. Its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Vessel Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew’s long departed souls.

Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship.

But the ship's plant life isn’t the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Vessel Iris with his AI construct may be their only hope for survival. . .

IN OUTER SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOUR PRAYERS

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My Review: What if Murderbot was a Buddhist monk, and arrives on a derelict generation ship to guide its long-dead colonists through samsara to the Light, but a bunch of irreligious bumbling academics need saving from...beings...while he's trying to do his work? Yes, this time he's male, and has a...situationship...with his AI. That's a major friction point with the normal humans he needs to save, because all life is sacred even when it's stupid and nasty.

It's a good story, it's got levels to think about that open like hatches hidden under green stuff then turn into wormholes, gates, passageways through reality into your busy monkey-brain. Whirling in my monkey-brain was a sneaky little thought: why do monks, who famously renounce the world, decide to help us worldly denizens of samsara (apparently Sanskrit for the same concept as "gefilte" or "mashed up and stuffed") only when we die?

But that's trespassing into religion, its uses and motivating ideas, its sacred territory....

What to enjoy about the monk with an AI sharing his brain, albeit in a subservient role, is the fertile territory for human nastiness to get directed at a "holy" person by the deeply secular people around him. I'm envious of Vessel Iris because he lives in a world of only a few tiny remnant religious nuts. Sounds like heaven to me. (See what I did there?) My missing parts of the fifth star came from my deep dislike of the Harry-Dresdenish self-recriminating litany of personal abuse Vessel Iris feeds himself. Since the book is all inside Vessel Iris' head, and since I want to shove him out an airlock about once every twenty pages, it made for a choppy, months-long reading experience. I made the deal with myself that I couldn't Pearl-Rule a book set on a failed generation ship with serious botanical Nostromo vibes and a monk who's treated like we'd treat a sex-trafficking politician for having an AI in his brain.

I don't think everyone will love this read. I'm not sure *I* loved this read. But I was completely unable to abandon ship. I lurked through the overgrown halls celebrating with nasty schadenfreude every time whatever it was picked off another creepy academic. I did not, in other words, root *for* anyone in the story, not even the dead colonists whose reasons for seeking a new world...well. I didn't like anyone. It wasn't an easy investment to make.

But it was one I absolutely did make.

This is a very philosophical horror-of-sorts story of how fear and safety are too deeply intertwined to be separable, no matter how much one tries to treat them as opposites or even antipodes on a spectrum. What happens when you're only safe when you're afraid is a subtle and fascinating frame to hang a space-locked-room mystery on.

It felt to me like the story smashed into a brick wall when Vessel Iris started in on his self-flagellation, but I stipulate that as a me problem. Leaving aside my annoyance I think the pace of the action is rising at a good storytelling clip; the ideas never got too top-heavy, causing weird bends in the plot (a major flaw in Becky Chambers' stories from my PoV); and the resolution was very nicely capping off the plot while not too obviously blaring the sequel-is-coming horn.

It might not be for you, but you will know within the first 10% if it isn't. Read a sample; there are genuine pleasures to be had in the story for people who don't have my oversensitivity to self-flagellation.

AFTER THE FALL, latest Edward Ashton outing

AFTER THE FALL
EDWARD ASHTON
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Would humans really make great pets?

Humans must be silent.
Humans must be obedient.
Humans must be good.

All his life, John has tried to live by those rules. Most days, it’s not too difficult. A hundred and twenty years after The Fall, and a hundred years after the grays swept in to pick the last dregs of humanity out of the wreckage of a ruined world, John has found himself bonded to Martok Barden nee Black Hand, one of the "good" grays. Sure, Martok is broke, homeless, and borderline manic, but he’s always treated John like an actual person, and sometimes like a friend. It’s a better deal than most humans get.

But when Martok puts John’s bond up as collateral against an abandoned house in the woods that he hopes to turn into a wilderness retreat for wealthy grays, John learns that there are limits to Martok’s friendship. Soon he finds himself caught between an underworld boss who thinks Martok is something that he very much is not, a girl who was raised by feral humans and has nothing but contempt for pets like John, and Martok himself, whose delusions of grandeur seem to be finally catching up with him.

Also, not for nothing, something in the woods has been killing people.

John has sixty days before Martok’s loan comes due to unravel the mystery of how humans wound up holding the wrong end of the domestication stick and find a way to turn Martok’s half-baked plans into profit enough to buy back his life, all while avoiding getting butchered by feral humans or having his head crushed by an angry gray. Easy peasy, right?

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My Review: I really hope y'all're catching on to Author Ashton. I confess I don't *get* why people weren't excited by Mickey17, because I thought it was a decent adaptation of Mickey7 as well as a good movie on its own; but mostly I'm a bit bumfuzzled as to how all Author Ashton's books aren't on the bestseller list. Every one I've read has been good-plus. I enjoy them, I spend time after reading them pondering about this bit that's really made me think, or that character who's so awful it must've been a big hoot to write them (specifically thinking of the one in The Fourth Consort of whom I said "'kindness and acceptance' sounds better than 'craven lickspittle sycophancy' doesn't it.") In a lot of ways this novel feels like Author Ashton taking a crack at some of the ideas not fully explored in that story.

I'm really thinking mostly of the ownership angle we delve into in this story, the ethics of cannibalism are unambiguous in The Fourth Consort whereas the Grays in this book are arguably the more vicious in their treatment of humans because they see us, say "aww how cute" and then go right on looking at us like there is nothing else to say or think. Someone who slaughters and eats you regards you as valuable; someone who views you as fungible, as a pet, does not. In a lot of ways it feels like the plays from the Roman Republic and early empire where the clever slave runs master's business better than master, saving the day and earning master's gratitude but never respect.

Like all Author Ashton's work, you're going to get some funny lines, and you'll never have any trouble remembering who said what to whom...I think that's why I like the Mickey series and why I think Director Bong did too, there's such a clear sense of the main characters' identity. What there isn't is a clear path towards resolving the conundrum the story orbits around: Is the condition of the humans going to change for the better? John and Martok are coming out of these events in a different state than they entered them but...well...is there a larger point to this larger story? If not, why bear down on it?

I enjoyed this stand-alone read, I thought it raised interesting points and gave me some good pondering to do. I was not convinced this was the best place to end the story, but it wasn't like it was poor on a craft level. It just could've leveled the read up, but chose not to.

Not the worst, or least forgivable, authorial peccadillo. I'll definitely await the next Ashton book with attentive eagerness.

PEDRO THE VAST, mycohorror/sporror at full throttle

PEDRO THE VAST
SIMÓN LÓPEZ TRUJILLO (tr. Robin Myers)
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Simón López Trujillo’s “mind-blowing” (Gabriela Cabezón Cámara) debut takes readers into a dry and degraded, fire-prone landscape where humanity has encroached a step too far into the natural world, and a deadly fungus mounts its own resistance . . .

In the disorienting, devastatingly tense world of López Trujillo, a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease, which has jumped to humans for the first time, but Pedro, miraculously, awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign mycologist, as well as a local priest, who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a prophet. Meanwhile Pedro's kids are left to fend for themselves: the young Cata, whose creepy art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher, and Patricio, who wasn't ready to be thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro’s condition eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget.

For readers of Jeff Vandermeer and Samanta Schweblin, López Trujillo is a next-generation Bolaño with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that's always one step ahead of us.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Mycohorror, sometimes "sporror" (a play on "spore horror"), has a history that goes back a way. In our Anthropocene climate change-plagued times it's grown in prevalence and in popularity. The entire cultural interest in ecohorror is only growing. The Last of Us was quite a cultural moment; Jeff Vandermeer's Area X novels still fly off the shelves; in the QUILTBAG community T. Kingfisher's Sworn Soldier series makes a stir.

all of which makes my eyebrows rise a bit: y'all do realize this is the Earth herself rising in outraged fury against the disease process we represent to her body, like planetary chemotherapy, right? Considering the Anthropocene's awful effects on the Earth, we'll be lucky if all that happens is her fever goes up and she unleashes the ancient life-givers the fungi onto us because then a few will, by the immutable statistics of Life, will make it through.

Subtle weirdness abounds in the world-building, the eponymous Pedro being...affected...in ways that drive the plot but do not allow for him to be more than a name and a list of symptoms most of the time. The story reaches a climax I (experienced old weird-fiction reader that I am) saw coming, with a big reveal that was expected—albeit intense—and a niggling issue of "who exactly is telling me this story?" gets addressed.

I think the main draw of this read is the author's effective story design, and the excellent pitch of the prose...Translator Myers, take your well-earned bow...that makes it a pleasure to spend these 140ish pages with this team. I can see this being filmed and becoming a hit. Chile's natural beauty has been badly damaged, so it feels to me like the right cultural moment to do this story filmic justice.

It's short enough to make a solid weekend's reading but not so short you'll look up and think "...that's IT?" when you're done. The idea of horror is to give you a jolt, this does that (a bit late in the game, but definitely does it) and does a good job of reminding insular Anglophone readers that the world is much bigger than just our part.

I'd offer more stars if the twist was not so obvious. I've already said that this is a me thing; I expect you to know how much of my bugaboo stock you share by now, I've been at the reviewing game twenty years! Even if we share them all, this is a story I think is worth your time and treasure.

BIG NOBODY, why is smoking back in positive framing?

BIG NOBODY
ALEX KADIS
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 10 March 2026

Rating: ? anywhere from 2, 2.5 to 5...

The Publisher Says: A wickedly funny coming-of-age novel about a misfit teenager in London determined to eliminate the one thing standing between her and a good life: her father

I think it’s safe to say that my father was probably always an abomination of nature.

It’s 1974 in London and Connie Costa’s already pitiful life has gone off the rails. She’s spiraling from the loss of her mother and younger brothers in a tragic accident. And the man responsible is her Dad—otherwise known as “The Fat Murderer.”

Kept at home under his increasingly tyrannical rule, Connie is an outcast who spends her nights conversing with the David Bowie poster on her wall and raiding her stash of whiskey and chocolate. Her only social outlet is the weekly gatherings with her father and their immigrant community of Greek “Freaks.” There she finds her life’s one bright sneaking off with her friend Vas to smoke cigarettes, debate literature, and joke about whether it is finally time to run away together. But when Connie sees an opportunity to get out from under her father’s thumb for good, she must make a perilous decision that will change her forever.

Devastatingly tender and riotously funny, Alex Kadis’ Big Nobody tells a warmhearted story about the rocky path to finding ourselves and the people who keep us afloat.

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My Review: Connie annoyed me from giddy-up to whoa. Being in her stream of consciousness required me to grab my mental reins and pull firmly back onto the path to...wherever it is we're going, Connie and her party of readers.

Greek immigrant culture in the 1970s was very patriarchal, making little room for female autonomy at any age let alone a teenager's urgently desired absence of supervision. After all, her controlling and abusive...we're told...father didn't bother to protect her from pedophilic abuse by her grandfather, so what good is it to her?

And here's where I get tired of the read. All of this emotional heat is Connie's stream of consciousness. I'm an incest survivor myself, so I can relate to the searing rage, hatred, and desire to escape in Connie's narration. I'm not sure the narrative choice to trap me in Connie's head serves the story well, because the casual slaps and the general oppressive misogyny start to feel like Connie being a bit overdramatic. It's not that the abuse did not occur, but that she could simply be so isolated, so without anyone to talk to, that her age-appropriate lack of perspective makes her point of view untrustworthy.

Since we're watching her evolve a plan to murder her father, that feeling is too powerful to ignore for this reader. I know why a teenager who's been victimized in body then re-victimized by being disbelieved about it is this enraged and this obsessed with revenge fantasies. But the voice, the sarcastic nasty voice, wore on me a lot. There's maybe 25% of the book set in 2007, where I'd've expected Connie to have developed a nuanced understanding of the events of the 1970s. Spoiler alert: Nope.

As a read, I'd rate it as pretty poor; as a story, not so much...it's a kind of strident klaxon blaring a message of "PAY ATTENTION! VICTIMS SHOULD BE BELIEVED!" that my own experience demands I support without any reference to my lack of enjoyment in reading this claustrophobic, overheated screech of rage.

So what the hell do I do now? Ask you to read a story whose storytelling was a bad miscalculation in my estimation, because the story being told is that urgently necessary to me?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

WHIDBEY, evoking a planet-scale beauty spot to soothe and smooth the pain of victimhood

WHIDBEY
T. KIRA MADDEN
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery on 10 March 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning literary achievement and portrait of three women connected through one man in the aftermath of his murder—the explosive and highly anticipated debut novel from beloved and award-winning memoirist, T Kira Madden.

Birdie Chang didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when she chose it, only that it was about as far away as she could get from her own life. She’s a woman on the run, desperate for an escape from the headlines back home and the look of concern in her girlfriend’s eyes—and from Calvin Boyer, the man who abused her as a child and who’s now resurfaced. On her way, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger on the ferry who offers her a proposition, a sinister solution, a plan for revenge.

But Birdie isn’t the only girl Calvin harmed back then. There’s also Linzie King, a former reality TV star who recently wrote all about it in her bestselling memoir. Though the two women have never met, their stories intertwine. Once Birdie arrives on Whidbey, she finally cracks the book’s spine, only to find too much she recognizes in its pages. Soon after, on the other side of the country, Calvin’s loving mother, Mary-Beth, receives a shocking phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered.

Calvin’s death sets into motion a series of events that sends each woman on a desperate search for answers. A complex whodunnit told from alternating points of view, Whidbey is searingly perceptive and astonishingly original. Exploring the long reach of violence and our flawed systems of incarceration and rehabilitation, this is a tense and provocative debut that’s sure to incite crucial questions about the pursuit of justice and who has real power over a story: the one who lives it, or the one who tells it?

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My Review: "Be careful what you wish for," taken to apotheosis. Now including "be careful what you say out loud" because you can never know who is listening...what they want from you...what they will do with, and to, the thoughts you leave unguarded in the air.

A paranoid thriller about sexual abuse of girls does not sound like something I, sexually abused by my mother, will find pleasant reading. It wasn't prurient...it stops short of recreating the abuse...and it very properly presents the topic in high relief instead of flattened into caricature.

Abuse is not foregrounded, at least the mechanics were not. Emotional devastation is this story's heart. I'm not exaggerating, unless you're made of stone, this is a deeply sad and often brutal tome. Linzie is my personal most awful victim of abuse because she parades it for attention, for the validating fame her honesty affords her and the materially comfortable living that brings. If that's not sad....

Birdie is mid-process in trauma terms. Her loose lips, her willingness to talk when silence would serve better, isn't like Linzie's garrulous yappin' for the cameras, the ghostwriter, the audience. Birdie doesn't have a plan, a purpose, a canny angle to show and sell. Birdie can't keep the chirps inside. It's a far worse place to be, because it's doing bad things to her belovèd girlfriend Trace.

But every abuser has a mother. How often do we, as a society, stop to think about what it means to a person to see their child in the harsh glow of a perp walk? How much rage and hate can this lone soul transmute into denial? Mary-Beth is the character I wanted to hug, to stand before her with my arms aroud her and just let her cry. Whatever she did, didn't, couldn't, wouldn't do, she is the one whose role in this was the most devastating to me. Then, while expecting her son to come home to her after incarceration and mandated psychotherapy, she hears the words your blood freezes even thinking about: "your child is dead."

Oh. My. GOD.

Parts one and two make the cases. The stakes get set. The pain is explained. No one's an angel but each one's a clear, passionate survivor. Part three's where we hit the top of the loop on the roller coaster and time speeds up as things happen, people talk but the Doppler effect renders them only partly comprehensible, events occur too fast for old-man me to see why they're causally connected to the first bits. The ending...well...it's a first novel, I grade on a curve for those, but...dude. Resolving plot threads should not feel as though you're doing a time-sucking chore you don't really want to do. Whatever the real ending was, and I'm morally certain there was one, it probably took the murky misty part-three energy around the bend.

If Author Madden reads this (ha! don't read reviews, your publicist does that) please take this sentence away, where you should go now, with you: You have an outstanding literary touch, a visual vocabulary most never acquire, and you need to read Mary Renault and Patricia Highsmith novels.

Everyone else: Support debut authors, or we'll never get more work from them. But maybe check this one out of the library.