After a promising start, this debut ends up being all bark, no bite.
A floundering young woman gains access to a world of privilege through her mysterious new boyfriend.
Twenty-nine-year-old El is used to living on the fringes. She spent her teen years in Manhattan in a cramped apartment with her single mother and her mother’s best friend, sharing a bedroom with the friend’s son. She received financial aid to attend a prestigious private school filled with ultrarich students but had only tangential access to their lives of quiet luxury. Even now, El can’t break through in her career as an actor, instead working in a bakery and trying to figure out her next move. When El’s old classmate Julia unexpectedly offers an invitation to a party at her family’s East Hampton home, El can’t resist returning to that tony world, even for just one night. It’s there that El meets Bryce, a Cambridge graduate from a filthy rich family who is immediately, and intensely, taken with her. Though El isn’t particularly attracted to Bryce’s looks or personality, she’s attracted to what being with him brings—the life of ease and financial security she’s always wanted. When the two quickly move in together, El begins to lose touch with the world outside her relationship, quitting her job, dumping her roommate, and ghosting her friends—just as Bryce’s true nature starts coming to light. The author is deft at creating a tense atmosphere—complete with suspicious characters, sinister motivations, disturbing events, and an off-kilter narrator—that will keep readers turning the pages. But the lackluster conclusion strains credulity, and a symbolic thread that runs throughout the novel—dogs across the country are running away from and rebelling against their owners—is unsuccessful and, ultimately, has no bearing on the plot.
After a promising start, this debut ends up being all bark, no bite.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593715024
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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