DREAMING OF YOU A Novel in Verse
and the consumed”; and lastly, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, the author and protagonist, who says simply “it’s been me, it’s always been me. The whole time.” Las Chismosas narrate Melissa’s journey as a young New York Latina who finds that her real life—writing poetry, looking for love—has been subsumed by the overpowering ghost of Selena as a cultural force. When Melissa decides to resurrect Selena, she becomes obsessively devoted to her at the expense of her own budding romantic relationship. The newly undead Selena eventually leaves Melissa to reconnect with her own career, and as she goes, whoever “Melissa Lozada-Oliva” is begins to dissolve, as well. Abraham Quintanilla, Yolanda Saldivar, and She arrive to fill the blank spaces. In this new millennium, Yolanda is reborn as an antihero, because sometimes you have to kill the thing you love most to truly be free. An enjoyably madcap journey through the wasteland of fame, popular culture, and feminine identity in a post-colonial world.
Lozada-Oliva, Melissa Astra House (192 pp.) $23.00 | Oct. 26, 2021 978-1-662-60059-3
A young poet spirals into a world of trouble and madness after she raises Tejana pop star Selena from the dead. Full of zaniness, humor, and existential questions about the ephemeral nature of fame and the toxic misogyny permeating our culture, this novel in verse is an experimental roller-coaster ride. The book opens with a cast of characters introducing Yolanda Saldivar, Selena’s convicted killer; Abraham Quintanilla, Selena’s father, an excellent approximation of machismo; “Las Chismosas,” a Spanish expression referring to gossips, often older women, here serving as the book’s chorus; an amorphous and dark “She,” like the villainess of a telenovela; “You,” introduced as “the consumer
HELLO, TRANSCRIBER
Morrissey, Hannah Minotaur (304 pp.) $27.99 | Nov. 30, 2021 978-1-2507-9595-3
Morrissey’s atmospheric suspense debut introduces a troubled female police transcriber who goes beyond her job description to solve a drug case. Gritty Black Harbor, Wisconsin, is a small city with big-city crime, the kind of place “that not only keeps decent people just racing past on the highway but attracts criminals and seedy characters who need somewhere to hide.” Newly hired police transcriber and aspiring writer Hazel Greenlee works the night shift, transcribing incident reports. On one of her first evenings, she’s horrified when her next-door neighbor Sam approaches her office and writes a message on the frosted window: “I hid a body.” The finger he uses is not his own. The following night, Hazel is startled to receive a report from Investigator Nikolai Kole, who had been suspended from the force six months earlier. She learns that Sam’s confession is tied to the overdose death of a 9-yearold boy at the hands of pill pusher Tyler Krejarek. When Hazel meets the “criminally attractive” Nik, she soon gets drawn into the investigation and a steamy affair despite being married to the controlling, gun-loving Tommy. As a former police transcriber, the author writes what she knows. It’s a shame she doesn’t explore this unusual law enforcement world in further detail. What starts out as an intriguing police procedural gets sidetracked into romantic suspense (plenty of sex but not much suspense), mixed up with some marital and family drama, and topped with a bit of an unreliable narrator. The overwritten prose with its excessive use of similes doesn’t help. People’s faces are too often compared to punctuation marks (“The vulpine lady’s smile deepened, a pair of parentheses framing her lurid red lips”). An intriguing premise, but the execution needs improvement.
12
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15 september 2021
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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