Hovers awkwardly between YA fantasy/romance and magical realism for grown-ups.
Debut adult novel from the bestselling author of The Last Legacy (2021) and Namesake (2021).
August Salt was 18 when he was accused of murdering his friend Lily Morgan. No longer welcome on Saoirse, the tiny Pacific Northwest island where they lived, he and his mother moved to the mainland, changed their last name, and started a new life. Fourteen years later, his mother’s insistence that her ashes be buried on her ancestral home sends him back to a place he didn’t expect to see again. For most of Saoirse’s residents, his return is unwelcome. For Emery Blackwood, it stirs up feelings she’s spent her whole adult life trying to suppress. An isolated community, an unsolved mystery, long-buried secrets coming to light: This is a classic setup for psychological suspense or gothic horror, and this story offers a bit of both. But it also offers a little something extra: The women of Saoirse are witches. Young has written several young adult novels full of invention, adventure, and sorcery. By the end of this novel, though, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she decided writing for grown-ups means combining a dour, lifeless tone with a plot that barely moves. And there’s something almost perverse about a narrative with a witch protagonist being so miserly with magic. The central tensions driving the story are pretty simple. Neither Emery nor August has ever recovered from the abrupt end of their youthful romance. Lily’s murderer has never been found. The people of Saoirse are worried that August will try to reclaim the orchard that his grandfather left to the community. Saoirse is a place unlike any other. The most compelling of these—the mystery surrounding Lily’s death, the unique nature of the island—get the least attention. August and Emery only decide to investigate their friend’s murder late in the novel. And, despite every first-person narrator here assuring us that Saoirse is a singular place with its own rules, the island comes across like any other small, insular place that depends on a seasonal tourism industry—sporadic acts of witchcraft notwithstanding.
Hovers awkwardly between YA fantasy/romance and magical realism for grown-ups.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35851-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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