Amore, the new-fashioned way, with awkward results.
In this short e-pistolary novel, a seasoned American author, Giorgio, is caught between reality and fantasy in pursuing his infatuation with an Italian beauty.
He meets the full-lipped, bikini-clad Sofia on a beach in Parma, where he’s overwhelmed by her stunning resemblance to Sophia L. (as in film legend Loren, whose surname is never stated) and instantly smitten. She is overjoyed to discover that not only is he reading an Italian translation of the same novel she’s reading, The Yemenite Girl (the title of Leviant’s reputation-making 1977 book), but he wrote it. They flirt and hug and part as friends, with plans of seeing each other sometime again. The rest of the novel consists of emails between them in which she reveals she has two unsatisfactory relationships she is unable to end—one with her icy Finnish husband and another with a married Italian—and he shamelessly does all he can to get her to leave both men. He counts on his “surreptitious allure” doing the trick. Sofia writes in faulty English, occasioning dozens of authorial asides by Giorgio in which he pores over the possible hidden meanings of her Freudian lapses, misspellings, and shifts in her terms of endearment (“carissimi,” for example, to the less intimate “caro”). As for his own emailing difficulties: “When I wrote to her, I was split in two. My forked pen, i.e., my keyboard, said one thing while my heart/mind was thinking another.” Even with its interesting reflections on modern language and allusions to the likes of Dante, Dali, and Epicurus, the novel ultimately strains to be more than a stylistic exercise. The alternate beginning and ending aren’t needed. But the work is lifted by its wry charm and creepy cleverness. You can’t help rooting for Giorgio, sort of.
Amore, the new-fashioned way, with awkward results.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781950539918
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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
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