Further evidence to cement Quin’s reputation as one of the most innovative, and most underappreciated, voices of her time.
Quin’s second novel (originally published in 1966) traces the fates of Ruth and Leonard as they settle back into binary monogamy after the death of their mysterious lodger, S, who had briefly been their invigorating third.
Ruth and Leonard are quintessential examples of the British midcentury bourgeois. Leonard works somewhat provisionally as a translator, but his real passion seems to be breeding orchids in his inherited weekend home somewhere on the coast of England. Ruth would like to be pregnant but is consistently uninterested in Leonard’s sexual advances. She channels all her eros into games she plays with her own image—considering her reflection in the mirror, trying on outfits, rearranging her body in various dissatisfied poses around their home. The couple is firmly settled in the habits of their middle age, traveling back and forth from their flat in town to Grey House by the coast, unable to break out of the stifling, claustrophobic conformity of their bourgeois repression, surrounded by the inherited clutter of the lives that came before their own. At the novel’s opening, Ruth and Leonard are also in mourning. The spring before, S had become their boarder to convalesce from an ailment that turns out to have been the aftereffects of an abortion. Enigmatic, playful, and keenly observant, S quickly became a stimulating third in their stultified lives, a person whom both Ruth and Leonard desire and confide in. When S disappears in a boating accident that may have been a suicide, Ruth and Leonard are left to pore obsessively through the journals and audio recordings she left behind. In searching for the truth about S’s death, they find instead a devastating clarity about the paucity of their own lives. Quin was a master stylist and a restless innovator in her own work. True to her inimitable form, the book develops its own method of overlapping language as Ruth and Leonard speak over and around each other, interrupted by poetically lineated sections where S’s recorded voice is represented alongside the blank space of her silences. The effect will likely make for heavy wading for many readers but results in an overheated, overcrowded novel that both dazzles and devastates in its uniquely rendered but nonetheless ubiquitous truths.
Further evidence to cement Quin’s reputation as one of the most innovative, and most underappreciated, voices of her time.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-91150-884-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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