Featuring 341 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children'sand YA books KIRKUSVOL. LXXXIX, NO. 4 | 15 FEBRUARY 2021 REVIEWS Bassem Youssef The doctor, comedian, and podcaster is now a middle-grade author p. 98 Also in the issue: Brandon Hobson, Joy McCullough, and Covid Comics from the editor’s desk Living in the Covid Moment Chairman BY TOM BEER HERBERT SIMON President & Publisher MARC WINKELMAN John Paraskevas # It was nearly one year ago that the world as we know it transformed. In Chief Executive Officer early March, I was still working at Kirkus’ office in midtown Manhattan MEG LABORDE KUEHN when we began to discuss if it made sense for all employees to come in every [email protected] Editor-in-Chief day—thus riding the subway and potentially being exposed to the coronavi- TOM BEER rus. The first New York City cases of Covid-19 had just been reported. No [email protected] Vice President of Marketing sooner had the staff agreed on a staggered schedule than everything in the SARAH KALINA city shut down and we began this yearlong stretch of working from home. [email protected] We’ve all weathered enormous changes in the past year—it sometimes Managing/Nonfiction Editor ERIC LIEBETRAU felt like living in slow motion and at warp speed simultaneously. Histo- [email protected] rians of the future will tell the story of this period, but in the meantime, Fiction Editor LAURIE MUCHNICK we have the raw and immediate reports of poets, artists, and essayists [email protected] living in the moment. Young Readers’ Editor VICKY SMITH Poetry, perhaps better than any other medium, has captured our [email protected] current state of suspension. Together in a Sudden Strange ness: America’s Young Readers’ Editor , edited by Alice Quinn and published by LAURA SIMEON Poets Respond to the Pandemic [email protected] Knopf in November, is a volume I’ve turned to again and again in recent Editor at Large weeks. The poems collected here—by Jericho Brown, Stephanie Burt, MEGAN LABRISE Fanny Howe, Ada Limón, Claudia Rankine, Vijay Seshadri, and oth- [email protected] Vice President of Kirkus Indie ers—are varied, each one a snapshot, whether blurry or in sharp focus. KAREN SCHECHNER I love Jill Bialosky’s “Ode” to Tylenol—as mundane a subject as you [email protected] Senior Indie Editor could imagine, except that the pain reliever was in short supply early in DAVID RAPP the pandemic. Grace Schulman’s “Gone” finds the poet looking out at [email protected] Indie Editor Washington Square Park from her apartment (“Camille Pissarro would MYRA FORSBERG have lingered here / He painted the Paris gardens from a window”), [email protected] reminding us that all great art is framed by circumstance. Associate Manager of Indie KATERINA PAPPAS Some of the most moving writing about [email protected] the pandemic has been the most personal, as lockdown cast new light Editorial Assistant JOHANNA ZWIRNER on the contours of our lives. Zadie Smith’s slender essay collection, [email protected] Intimations, published by Penguin in July, showcased this nimble writer Mysteries Editor musing on creativity, suffering, privilege, and inheritance; it was one THOMAS LEITCH Contributing Editor of my favorite books of 2020. In Bill Hayes’ How We Live Now: Scenes GREGORY McNAMEE , published by Bloomsbury in August, the partner of From the Pandemic Copy Editor the late Oliver Sacks reflected on how the lingering grief of losing a BETSY JUDKINS loved one (Sacks died in 2015) was honed by the loneliness of quaran- Designer tine; the text is accompanied by stark photographs of New York City ALEX HEAD Kirkus Editorial Production Editor and the people he found on its empty streets in March and April. In ROBIN O’DELL A World Out of Reach: Dispatches From Life Under Lockdown, published [email protected] Kirkus Editorial Associate by Yale University Press in November, editor Meghan O’Rourke col- Production Editor lected the ’s “Pandemic Files” from the spring—stories, STEPHANIE SUMMERHAYS Yale Review [email protected] poems, and essays by such writers as Katie Kitamura, Nell Freuden- Website and Software Developer berger, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Victoria Chang, and Emily Greenwood. PERCY PEREZ [email protected] This month sees the publication of COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology (Graphic Mundi, Advertising Director Feb. 15), presenting work made in response to a call issued in April of last year. As editors Kendra MONIQUE STENSRUD Boileau and Rich Johnson explained to me in an interview on page 56 of this issue, comics have a [email protected] Advertising Associate long tradition, contra expectation, of taking on serious subjects, from Art Spiegelman’s Maus to TATIANA ARNOLD Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. “Comics are so good at expressing the ineffable, what you just can’t [email protected] Graphic Designer put down in words,” Boileau told me. The work in this volume, like the ones discussed above, KYLA NOVAK delivers an immediate gut punch—the artists’ unfiltered visions of life in the midst of a global [email protected] pandemic. In years to come we’ll have more sophisticated analyses and deeper understandings. Controller MICHELLE GONZALES But I’m grateful that these first responders captured the singular experience of what we’ve been [email protected] through these last 12 months. for customer service or subscription questions, 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 Andrew Frasz 2 | 15 february 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 INTERVIEW: BRANDON HOBSON ................................................... 14 impartial editors of Kirkus. MYSTERY ..............................................................................................37 SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY .........................................................42 ROMANCE ...........................................................................................44 nonfiction INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS .........................................................49 REVIEWS .............................................................................................49 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................... 50 INTERVIEW: KENDRA BOILEAU & RICH JOHNSON .....................56 children’s INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ......................................................... 91 REVIEWS ............................................................................................. 91 EDITOR’S NOTE................................................................................... 92 ON OUR COVER: BASSEM YOUSSEF .............................................. 98 BOARD & NOVELTY BOOKS ............................................................129 young adult INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ........................................................ 135 REVIEWS ............................................................................................ 135 EDITOR’S NOTE..................................................................................136 INTERVIEW: JOY MCCULLOUGH ...................................................140 Martin Duberman, who had exclusive indie archival access, adapts his groundbreaking INDEX TO STARRED REVIEWS ........................................................150 biography of the legendary human rights REVIEWS ............................................................................................150 activist and performer for teen readers. Read EDITOR’S NOTE..................................................................................152 the review on p. 139. INDIE BOOKS OF THE MONTH ....................................................... 169 BOOK TO SCREEN .............................................................................170 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. APPRECIATIONS: THE WOMAN WARRIOR AT 45........................171 You can also access the current issue and back issues of Kirkus Reviews on our 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 emailing [email protected]. | kirkus.com | contents | 15 february 2021 | 3 fiction These titles earned the Kirkus Star: WHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS Abrams, Stacey Doubleday (384 pp.) 2034 by Elliot Ackerman; trans. by James Stavridis ...........................5 $23.95 | May 11, 2021 978-0-385-54657-7 ANTONIO by Beatriz Bracher; trans. by Adam Morris .......................8 SECOND PLACE by Rachel Cusk .......................................................11 A progressive superstar pens her first political thriller. LORNA