“A secretary at a comic book company tries to track down a co-worker’s killer.” secret identity
SECRET IDENTITY
just work at a publishing house, but she is willing to settle for work as a word processor operator. When even this modest goal proves unattainable, San starts working in a flower shop. She meets a woman named Su-ae—who is as bold and impetuous as San is cautious and reserved—and falls for an unnamed photographer. Shin is known for revealing the ways in which her culture oppresses and isolates people—especially women. With San, she has created a protagonist who is professionally thwarted and incapable of forming attachments. San accepts Su-ae’s friendship, but she also pushes the other woman away. San becomes obsessed with a man she barely knows because he offers her a couple of compliments. At the same time, her desire for him is tangled up with the still-raw feelings she has from being rejected by her only childhood friend after a brief intimate moment. Throughout these travails, though, San remains something of a cypher—inaccessible not just to the people around her, but also to the reader. The violent phantasmagoria of the story’s climax reinforces the sense that San is more a symbol of modern alienation than a fully developed character. Overly reliant on sentimentality and shock.
Segura, Alex Flatiron Books (368 pp.) $27.99 | March 15, 2022 978-1-250-80174-6 A secretary at a comic book company tries to track down a co-worker’s killer in this taut thriller. For nearly as long as she can remember, Carmen Valdez has loved comic books. The superhero stories sustained her during her rough childhood in Miami—they were “an intangible thing that got her through her own day-to-day.” When she moves to New York in 1975 and finds a job at Triumph Comics, she sees a chance to get her big break in the industry, but it doesn’t turn out well—her co-workers turn out to be “a squad of over-the-hill assholes,” and her boss has no interest in letting her try her hand at a writing gig. When a writer named Harvey Stern approaches her to collaborate with him on a project, unbeknownst to their boss, she warily accepts; they come up with an idea they think will surely be a hit. And it is, but Harvey is murdered, and Carmen finds out that he failed to credit her for her work before his bloody demise. So she sets out to track down his killer, all the while trying to figure out how to be recognized for her work by her oblivious, sexist boss. Meanwhile, she’s forced to deal with the sudden reappearance of her ex-lover, who’s shown up in New York under mysterious circumstances. Segura’s book works on so many levels, it’s almost hard to keep track—as a love letter to comic books, it’s as powerful as anything since Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). And as a thriller, it’s smart, perfectly paced, and wonderfully atmospheric—Segura captures the intense, grimy milieu of 1970s New York with aplomb. You don’t have to be a comics fan to love this novel; it’s a masterful book filled with real heart and soul. A triumph.
MY VOLCANO
Stintzi, John Elizabeth Two Dollar Radio (330 pp.) $17.99 paper | March 22, 2022 978-1-953387-16-5 A genre-bending novel that circles a volcano mysteriously rising from the Central Park Reservoir. On June 2, 2016, a jogger observes a geological protrusion slowly emerging in Central Park. Three weeks later, the formation, now determined to be a volcano, has grown to 2 1/2 miles tall and is upending life in New York City. Around the story of the volcano’s appearance Stintzi weaves the lives of the novel’s diverse characters, including a folklore professor, a Mongolian shepherd, a White trans science-fiction writer, a manager at the “emotionmanaging service” startup Easy-Rupt, and an 8-year-old Mexican boy who is thrust back in time to Tenochtitlan in 1516. As the characters’ lives intersect, run parallel, and mirror each other, they experience an array of transformations: One slowly becomes a green network that incorporates all life in its path, while another discovers that she is turning to stone. In the background lurk the Otherwise, otherworldly beings capable of numerous rebirths. Among the narrative sections, Stintzi intersperses the dates and victims of real-world violence in 2016, including the Pulse nightclub shooting and the shooting of Alton Sterling by police officers in Baton Rouge. At times, this ambitious novel can feel unwieldy, with its weighty subject matter and complex, formal innovation. However, Stintzi has a gift for meticulously crafted worldbuilding and captures the tender drama of human (and, in this novel, extrahuman) relationships. Patient readers will be rewarded by their arrival at the book’s dazzling conclusion. A vibrant ecosystem of a novel that deals honestly with the beauty and horror of human and ecological connectedness.
VIOLETS
Shin, Kyung-sook Trans. by Anton Hur Feminist Press (218 pp.) $15.95 paper | April 12, 2022 978-1-558612-90-7 The English translation of an early work by the author of The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (2015) and Please Look After Mom (2011). One of South Korea’s most celebrated writers, Shin captured the attention of Anglophone readers when she won the Man Asian Literary Prize. This slender novel begins in the early 1970s with the birth of a baby girl— unwanted because of her sex—in a small village. Oh San’s family has little social status, and she and her mother move deeper into the margins after San’s father disappears. As a young woman, San moves to Seoul. Her real dream is to become a writer or 32
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1 february 2022
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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