Featuring 348 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children'sand YA books KIRKUSVOL. LXXXIX, NO. 10 | 15 MAY 2021 REVIEWS David Yoon The bestselling YA novelist branches out with a new adult thriller and a teen romance imprint Also in the issue: Alison Bechdel, Olivia Laing, and Camryn Garrett Plus: A new Stamped remix brings the anti-racist message to kids FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK | Tom Beer Freedom’s Just Another Word Chairman HERBERT SIMON President & Publisher MARC WINKELMAN John Paraskevas # I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom. How do we achieve it? Why do Chief Executive Officer some people deny it to others? And what does it even mean to be free? MEG LABORDE KUEHN I’ve gotten into this philosophical frame of mind via two new books [email protected] Editor-in-Chief I’ve been reading. The first is Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and TOM BEER Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 20), a sprawling [email protected] Vice President of Marketing history of ideas and culture in the years between the end of the Second SARAH KALINA World War in 1945 and the intensification of American involvement in the [email protected] Vietnam War around 1965. (I’m listening to the nearly 35-hour audiobook, Managing/Nonfiction Editor ERIC LIEBETRAU read in suitably professorial tones by David Colacci.) [email protected] Menand, a staff writer at the New Yorker, writes that he wanted to Fiction Editor LAURIE MUCHNICK explore this period (roughly contiguous with his own youth) to under- [email protected] stand the transformation in American society that had opened it to art Young Readers’ Editor VICKY SMITH and ideas from abroad. In the course of this exploration, Menand discusses a range of artists and [email protected] thinkers who left their marks on the time, including George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Young Readers’ Editor Arendt, David Riesman, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, and many, many more. LAURA SIMEON “People cared,” he writes of this cultural blossoming. “Ideas mat- [email protected] Editor at Large tered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered. The MEGAN LABRISE way people judged and interpreted paintings, movies, and poetry [email protected] Vice President of Kirkus Indie mattered. People believed in liberty, and they thought it really meant KAREN SCHECHNER something. They believed in authenticity, and thought it really meant [email protected] Senior Indie Editor something. They believed in democracy and (with some blind spots) DAVID RAPP in the common humanity of everyone on the planet.” [email protected] Indie Editor Menand doesn’t ignore the racism and other prejudices of the era, MYRA FORSBERG nor the wrongheadedness of America’s military interventions over- [email protected] seas. He may oversell the rosy idealism of the period, but the contrast Associate Manager of Indie KATERINA PAPPAS with our own cynical moment is nevertheless undeniable. And he [email protected] astutely homes in on the concept that underlaid the American ethos Editorial Assistant JOHANNA ZWIRNER of those years: “If you asked me when I was growing up what the most [email protected] important good in life was, I would have said ‘freedom.’ Now I can see Mysteries Editor that freedom was the slogan of the time. The word was invoked to jus- THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Editor tify everything. As I got older, I started to wonder just what freedom GREGORY McNAMEE is, or what it can realistically mean.” Copy Editor Olivia Laing engages with the concept of freedom, in her own inimitable manner, in Every­ BETSY JUDKINS body: A Book About Freedom (Norton, May 4). While Menand takes a broad, bird’s-eye view of Designer a two-decade period, Laing channels her inquiry through the life and work of Wilhelm Reich ALEX HEAD Kirkus Editorial Production Editor (1897-1957). Best remembered for his eccentric—well, crackpot—development of the “orgone ROBIN O’DELL accumulator” late in his career, he began as an Austrian psychoanalyst who sought to bridge [email protected] Kirkus Editorial Associate the work of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, including the individual Production Editor physical body—as well as the communal body—in his healing work. STEPHANIE SUMMERHAYS [email protected] Reich opens windows onto many other figures—Susan Sontag, Kathy Website and Software Developer Acker, Andrea Dworkin, the Marquis de Sade, Agnes Martin, Bayard PERCY PEREZ Rustin, Philip Guston—whom Laing productively investigates. [email protected] Advertising Director Laing writes, “[What] I found most exciting about Reich was the MONIQUE STENSRUD way he functioned as a connector, drawing together many different [email protected] Advertising Associate aspects of the body, from illness to sex, protest to prisons. It was these TATIANA ARNOLD resonant regions I wanted to explore, and so I took him as a guide, [email protected] Graphic Designer charting a course right through the twentieth century, in order to KYLA NOVAK understand the forces that still shape and limit bodily freedom now.” [email protected] Read my interview with Laing on Page 58, and by all means check Controller MICHELLE GONZALES out both these books. In their own ways, each sheds light on the [email protected] highly contested concepts of freedom that still resonate in Ameri- for customer service or subscription questions, can life. please call 1-800-316-9361 Print indexes: www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/print-indexes Submission Guidelines: www.kirkusreviews.com/about/submission-guidelines 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 David Zaugh Photography 2 | 15 may 2021 | from the editor’s desk | kirkus.com | you can now purchase books online at kirkus.com contents fiction The Kirkus Star is awarded INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ...........................................................4 REVIEWS ...............................................................................................4 to books of remarkable EDITOR’S NOTE.....................................................................................6 merit, as determined by the ON THE COVER: DAVID YOON ......................................................... 14 impartial editors of Kirkus. MYSTERY ............................................................................................. 39 SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY ......................................................... 41 ROMANCE ........................................................................................... 43 nonfiction INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ......................................................... 45 REVIEWS ............................................................................................. 45 EDITOR’S NOTE...................................................................................46 INTERVIEW: ALISON BECHDEL .......................................................52 INTERVIEW: OLIVIA LAING ..............................................................58 children’s INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ......................................................... 87 REVIEWS ............................................................................................. 87 EDITOR’S NOTE (PICTURE BOOKS) .................................................88 FEATURE: STAMPED (FOR KIDS) .................................................... 94 EDITOR’S NOTE (MIDDLE-GRADE) ................................................ 98 BOARD & NOVELTY BOOKS ............................................................129 young adult INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ........................................................139 REVIEWS ............................................................................................139 INTERVIEW: CAMRYN GARRETT .................................................. 144 Elin Hilderbrand’s 27th novel takes place in the greenroom of the afterlife, as a newly indie dead Nantucket novelist watches life unfold INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ........................................................154 without her. Read the review on p. 24. REVIEWS ............................................................................................154 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................. 156 Don’t wait on the mail for reviews! You can read pre­publication reviews as INDIE BOOKS OF THE MONTH ........................................................173 they are released on kirkus.com—even before they are published in the magazine. You can also access the current issue and back issues of Kirkus Reviews on our SEEN & HEARD ................................................................................. 174 website by logging in as a subscriber. If you do not have a username or password, please contact customer care to set up your account by calling 1.800.316.9361 or APPRECIATIONS: BOB DYLAN AT 80 .............................................175 emailing [email protected]. | kirkus.com | contents | 15 may 2021 | 3 fiction These titles earned the Kirkus Star: THE COMMUNE Abeel, Erica Adelaide Books (328 pp.) THE COMMUNE by Erica Abeel .......................................................... 4 $22.30 paper | Jul. 4, 2021 978-1-954351-79-0 A PASSAGE NORTH by Anuk Arudpragasam .....................................7 This sharp, shapely roman à clef FIERCE LITTLE THING