Mesmerizing and luminous ... A literary mystery with a supernatural twist, rooted in humanity and enduring love ... Weaves together a wide assortment of characters and dovetailing narratives, which in less capable hands might read as meandering and confusing.
Wonderful ... Interesting ... In total, Castellani does a fairly incredible thing: He removes his central narrators from the action of the story and instead builds a world that remembers them and, further, can’t hide from the truths and confessions in their memory.
Chapters are organized in a way that at first can feel overwhelming, but becomes captivating ... The novel does an excellent job building eight strong point-of-view characters, making all of their realistic lives, concerns, and struggles interesting ... Extremely well-done. The plot and mysteries are engaging, the characters are complex, the moralities ambiguous and thought-provoking.
Devastating ... Each character exhibits a varying capacity for coping with love and loss, and all are susceptible to the limits of understanding and self-delusion. A raw but beautifully rendered exploration of the transformative and sprawling nature of suffering.
Reads like a whodunit ... The most distinctive element of Last Seen is how Castellani writes the voices of the dead. Rather than fit the paranormal into a familiar frame of reference, Castellani crafts perspectives that scoff at chronological time and geographic specificities but are abundant in poetry. He dazzles with apt meditations on masculinity, freedom and all the grittiness inherent in human connection, all presented in colloquial language.
A brooding, lyrical story about the preciousness of life brought to us by the voices of the dead ... Even though the crime-mystery framing adds some suspense, it’s an unnecessary gimmick next to the moving portraits of lives cut short and lessons learned by the survivors.
Castellani blends true crime tropes with magical realism in his convoluted latest ... Just as the characters are trapped between the living and dead, the novel is suspended between the expectations of a thriller plot and its literary ambitions, and doesn’t deliver on either. It’s a mess.
