“Four female assassins on the brink of retirement are brought back into the game.” killers of a certain age
significance and details that don’t seem relevant. It takes a while for the book to get moving, but once the trial begins, it becomes more compelling, and the courtroom scenes are where the writing shines brightest. The characters aren’t as well developed as they should be, though, often feeling wooden or monochromatic—some always say the right thing while others always say or do the wrong thing—and the ending is predictable. A well-paced story that highlights several timely issues, with a stimulating courtroom trial that makes it worth reading.
BLOOD RED
Ponce, Gabriela Trans. by Sarah Booker Restless Books (192 pp.) $18.00 paper | Oct. 4, 2022 978-1-63206-330-4 A woman adrift in her late 30s contends with a complex constellation of romantic relationships and their effects on her internal and bodily identity. The unnamed narrator, a 38-year-old Ecuadorian woman, is at something of a crossroads: married to a man from whom she’s long been emotionally dissociated; technically childless (a qualifier that isn’t fully explained until later in the book); and stuck in a hazy reality divorced from meaning. For her, “anything that isn’t falling in love has never merited much attention,” and she spends her evenings in an adrenaline-fueled haze, drinking with friends at bars and warehouses. Soon, she meets an enigmatic filmmaker and enters into an all-consuming, meticulously described relationship. Though the contours of the man’s psyche are never totally clear—he’s quiet, mysterious, and has a small daughter—the protagonist’s bond with him is profound, and for the duration of their relationship his house is a life-encapsulating cave, his bed “the bed of the world in its disorder and plenitude.” The relationship is simultaneously ecstatic and emotionally devastating, and when it falters, she has an emotional crisis, getting into accidents and meeting strange men while seemingly searching for a deeper source of meaning. As her sense of turmoil builds, she’s compelled to move to Spain to live with M, a poet with whom she’s carried on a lengthy correspondence. There, she must make a decision that encompasses the ownership of her body, her relationship to men, and her direction in life. In this Englishlanguage debut, as translated by Booker, Ponce’s prose is rich and atmospheric, and almost every scene operates on multiple emotional layers; this makes the narrator fully palpable despite the omission of certain biographical details. Ponce masterfully shows how despair and desire collide within one person, creating an entire universe of deeply felt emotional consequences. Though the plot is sometimes meandering—and a fair portion of the action is driven by the protagonist’s paramours, leading to an occasional sense of passivity—the novel’s searing exploration of unrequited love makes up for it. Dark, beautiful, and a little disturbing.
34
|
1 august 2022
|
fiction
|
kirkus.com
|
THE WHALEBONE THEATRE
Quinn, Joanna Knopf (576 pp.) $29.00 | Oct. 4, 2022 978-0-593-32170-6
A profound sibling bond gets the Seagrave children through their dysfunctional childhood and shapes their experiences during World War II. Cristabel is 4 years old when her widowed father, Jasper Seagrave, remarries. The only redeeming thing about her stepmother, Rosalind, who clearly hates her off the bat, is the prospect that she might produce a brother. Instead, there’s a sister, Flossie—but following her father’s accidental death and the comfort offered Rosalind by his younger brother, there’s a boy cousin, Digby, as well. The three children are raised together in the unusual household at Chilcombe, with Cristabel leading their adventures. These take an exciting turn in 1928, the year Cristabel turns 12, when a dead whale washes up on the beach. The household creates a proscenium stage using its bones, and she becomes the director of a quirky theater company that includes all the adults at Chilcombe, among them an avant-garde Russian painter and his girlfriends, Hilly and Philly. But the clock is ticking on this magical world. The war that begins just as the children enter adulthood sweeps them apart and turns Quinn’s debut into what feels almost like a different book entirely, driven by fear and suspense rather than whimsy and humor, with scenes of espionage and violence careening toward what one suspects is inevitable tragedy. Which, to be fair, is exactly the sort of thing war does in real life. Told partly with letters, lists, and scrapbook cuttings, there’s something old-fashioned about this novel, even in its handling of its stubborn, independent female lead, a Jo March type, if Jo March joined the British special forces and became a secret agent in France. This big, old-fashioned, seriocomic “crumbling estate” family saga works best before the war comes along.
KILLERS OF A CERTAIN AGE
Raybourn, Deanna Berkley (368 pp.) $27.00 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-593-20068-1 Four female assassins on the brink of retirement are brought back into the game by a surprising assassination attempt—on them. Since they were recruited in their 20s, Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have been working as secret assassins for a clandestine international organization originally created to hunt Nazis. Now they’re in their mid-60s, and the Museum—as its denizens call the elite group—has sent them on an all-expenses-paid cruise to celebrate their
