A comic take on obsession and the painful process of romantic recovery.
In Monti’s comic novel, a hapless medical reporter attends a conference in the hopes of winning back the love of his life.
It’s 1999, and seasoned journalist Vincent Cappelini has been hired to cover a dermatologists’ conference for the Giornale della Faccia, Italy’s premier dermatology journal. It’s an easy gig, interviewing sunscreen-slathered skin doctors around a hotel pool, but Vincent’s real interest lies in the fact that the conference is being held in San Caliente, California, the seaside town where Melissa Taylor, his ex-girlfriend who left him 13 months ago, now resides. Vincent’s ongoing preoccupation with Melissa is about more than unrequited feelings. He considers himself monosexual, a term of his own coinage that combines the characteristics of demisexuality and monomania. Monosexuality is Vincent’s “self-appointed, glittering, gold badge of honor. A rare, eclectic, yet-to-be-discovered phenomenon that makes him special, makes Melissa special. Makes being with Melissa extra special.” He arrives at San Caliente’s El Famous hotel, quickly falls asleep by the pool, and suffers a horrible sunburn. The conference only goes downhill from there: Vincent gets food poisoning from off-menu fugu (pufferfish), runs into his least favorite former co-worker, and reignites the passions of an unstable pig-skin researcher, whose past advances led to Vincent’s termination from a previous job. Most troubling of all is the tempting presence of Paige, a hotel employee whom Vincent might even find attractive, despite her not being Melissa: “She’s definitely someone who would have given Vincent pause—before Melissa,” Monti writes. “It’s a first impression….But like auras, Vincent puts a lot of stock into his first impressions.” Madcap happenings, including a Frank Sinatra–themed karaoke competition, lead Vincent to finally confront the horrible truth at the center of his monosexuality, once and for all.
Monti displays a cartoonish humor that keeps his protagonist’s disturbing obsession from darkening the novel’s tone. For example, everything on the hotel’s “presidential floor” is uncomfortably undersized as an homage to five-foot-four James Madison. Vincent calls the hotel’s front desk to complain about the Madison suite he’s been booked into and asks if there’s a Lincoln suite he might take instead (since Lincoln, was, of course, quite tall); the voice on the line replies, “There’s no Lincoln Room on the presidential floor. The Lincoln room is on the Luxury Car level….There’s also a Lincoln room on the New York Tunnel Floor. That’s the sixth floor. Lincoln, Holland, and Queens Midtown…all very nice rooms. Long rooms.” The book vacillates between using the neurotic Vincent as the locus of its humor and satirizing the world around him, which has the effect of capturing the peculiar alienation of heartache: Sometimes Vincent seems to be the lone sane man in a delusional world, and at other times, he appears to be the lone delusional man in a sane one. This is a poolside read that has more beneath its surface than initially appears, and it offers readers an often funny and always engaging look at how, sometimes, people need to be pulled through the healing process—even when they don’t think they’re ready to move on.
A comic take on obsession and the painful process of romantic recovery.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781956440898
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Madville Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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