Featuring 367 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children'sand YA books KIRKUSVOL. LXXXVIII, NO. 10 | 15 MAY 2020 REVIEWS Tori Amos The singer/songwriter gets political in a new book, Resistance p. 50 Also in the issue: Daniel Mason, Lauren Castillo, Adiba Jaigirdar & more from the editor’s desk: Life During Wartime Chairman BY TOM BEER HERBERT SIMON President & Publisher MARC WINKELMAN John Paraskevas # During times of stress and strife, many readers long for books that deliver Chief Executive Officer pure escapism—the lushly imagined worlds of science fiction and fantasy, the MEG LABORDE KUEHN tidy puzzles of a cozy mystery, or the reassuring happily-ever-after of a romance. [email protected] Editor-in-Chief (A friend who never read a romance novel in her life tells me that while shelter- TOM BEER ing in place she now consumes them like candy.) [email protected] Vice President of Marketing Other, hardier souls stare the beast directly in the eye: They’re the ones cur- SARAH KALINA rently racing through Lawrence Wright’s new thriller, The End of October (Knopf, [email protected] May 12), about a deadly global pandemic and the American microbiologist fight- Managing/Nonfiction Editor ERIC LIEBETRAU ing to control it. “Featuring accounts of past plagues and pandemics, descrip- [email protected] tions of pathogens and how they work, and dark notes about global warming, Fiction Editor LAURIE MUCHNICK the book produces deep shudders,” says our reviewer. (Not now, thanks—I’ll [email protected] Tom Beer wait for the paperback.) Book clubs everywhere are embracing epidemic clas- Children’s Editor VICKY SMITH sics: The Knopf Doubleday club is tackling The Plague by Albert Camus (1948) [email protected] while the ’s reading group has turned to Daniel Defoe’s (1722). Guardian A Journal of the Plague Year Young Adult Editor Through these long days of lockdown in New York, I find myself drawn instead to tales of WWII LAURA SIMEON [email protected] London during the Blitz—the original source of the phrase “Keep Calm and Editor at Large Carry On,” now emblazoned on T-shirts, mugs, and tote bags. As Erik Larson MEGAN LABRISE [email protected] recounts in his new book, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Vice President of Kirkus Indie Defiance During the Blitz (Crown, Feb. 25), the Germans unleashed a relentless aer- KAREN SCHECHNER ial assault on the city of London in 1940-41: “57 consecutive nights of bombing, [email protected] Senior Indie Editor followed by an intensifying series of nighttime raids over the next six months.” DAVID RAPP Larson wondered how Churchill, newly appointed prime minister, and his [email protected] Indie Editor circle endured this trial—“the dark moments and the light, the romantic entan- MYRA FORSBERG glements and the debacles, the sorrows and laughter, and the odd little episodes [email protected] that reveal how life was really lived under Hitler’s tempest of steel.” Larson draws Associate Manager of Indie KATERINA PAPPAS a rich portrait of Churchill’s world, with a focus on lesser-known figures such [email protected] as his children, bodyguard, and private secretary. The Kirkus reviewer deems it Editorial Assistant JOHANNA ZWIRNER “captivating.” [email protected] The Blitz has been the inspiration for numerous novels showcasing the pluck—and occasional pet- Mysteries Editor tiness—of ordinary Britons going about their daily lives under harrowing circumstances. The protago- THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Editor nist of Henry Green’s Caught (New York Review Books, 2016) is a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service GREGORY McNAMEE shuttling between his London service and his family in the countryside; it was first published while Copy Editor World War II was still being waged. Classics such as Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948) and BETSY JUDKINS Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951) offer atmospheric renderings of life in wartime London Designer drawn from the authors’ own observations and experiences. For a nonfiction ALEX HEAD Director of Kirkus Editorial account of writers in London, turn to Lara Feigel’s The Love-Charm of Bombs: Rest- LAUREN BAILEY less Lives in the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2013), which follows Green, Greene, [email protected] Production Editor Bowen, Rose Macauley, and Hilde Spiel through the wreckage of 1940 and ’41. HEATHER RODINO Wartime London has remained a favorite subject for inventive contemporary [email protected] novelists born well after the last bombs had fallen. Among the highlights of Kate Website and Software Developer PERCY PEREZ Atkinson’s Life After Life (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, 2013) are the passages [email protected] that drop its continuously reborn protagonist, Ursula Todd, into the bombed-out Advertising Director MONIQUE STENSRUD city of 1940. Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (Simon & Schuster, 2016) [email protected] offers some of London’s Bright Young Things a painful education in the realities Advertising Associate TATIANA ARNOLD of war. Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch (Riverhead, 2006) opens in 1947 and slowly [email protected] works backward to reveal the lives of a circle of characters living through the war Graphic Designer in London—among them Kay Langrish, a lesbian ambulance driver on the titular night watch. The final LIANA WALKER [email protected] section brings us to the awful destruction of the Blitz, as Kay comes to assist the inhabitants caught in Controller the rubble of a bombed-out Pimlico house. MICHELLE GONZALES Perhaps I find something consoling in these tales of ordinary lives carried on at an extraordinary [email protected] for customer service moment in history. Or maybe I’m just an inveterate Anglophile. Either way, these books have much to or subscription questions, offer readers living in this extraordinary moment of our own. please call 1-800-316-9361 Print indexes: www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/print-indexes Submission Guidelines: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/submission-guidlines Kirkus Blog: www.kirkusreviews.com/blog Subscriptions: www.kirkusreviews.com/subscription Advertising Opportunities: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/advertising- Newsletters: www.kirkusreviews.com/subscription/newsletter/add Cover photo by opportunities Paulina Otylie Surys 2 | 15 may 2020 | from the editor’s desk | kirkus.com | you can now purchase books online at kirkus.com contents fiction INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ...........................................................4 The Kirkus Star is awarded REVIEWS ...............................................................................................4 to books of remarkable EDITOR’S NOTE.....................................................................................6 INTERVIEW: DANIEL MASON .......................................................... 14 merit, as determined by the TRANSLATIONS: DANIEL HAHN .....................................................24 impartial editors of Kirkus. MYSTERY ............................................................................................. 34 SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY ......................................................... 38 ROMANCE ........................................................................................... 41 nonfiction INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ......................................................... 43 REVIEWS ............................................................................................. 43 EDITOR’S NOTE...................................................................................44 COVER STORY: TORI AMOS ..............................................................50 INTERVIEW: BLAKE GOPNIK ........................................................... 56 children’s INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS .........................................................99 REVIEWS .............................................................................................99 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................. 100 INTERVIEW: LAUREN CASTILLO ...................................................106 BOARD & NOVELTY BOOKS ............................................................141 CONTINUING SERIES ......................................................................147 young adult INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ....................................................... 149 REVIEWS ........................................................................................... 149 EDITOR’S NOTE..................................................................................150 INTERVIEW: ADIBA JAIGIRDAR ....................................................154 In her latest genre-defying book, Just Us, National Book Critics Circle Award winner indie INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ........................................................167 Claudia Rankine offers a work that should REVIEWS ............................................................................................167 move, challenge, and transform every reader EDITOR’S NOTE.................................................................................168 who encounters it. Read the review on p. 86. INTERVIEW: MELANIE FIGG ...........................................................174 BOOKS OF THE MONTH .................................................................. 189 Don’t wait on the mail for reviews! You can read pre-publication reviews as they are released on kirkus.com—even before they are published in the magazine. SEEN & HEARD