McBride is a consummate stylist whose individual sentences shine far more brightly than her novel as a whole.
Two lovers navigate the legacy of an event that threatens to define both their relationship and their identities.
Readers familiar with McBride’s novel The Lesser Bohemians (2016) will recognize this book’s main characters: Eily, a drama student who turns 20 midway through the novel’s timeline, and her 40-year-old lover, Stephen, an established actor in the London scene who is currently directing an autobiographical film about his traumatic past. Told in interwoven storylines—the Now in which the couple dances around a painful conversation, and scenes from the past which has led them here—the book is narrated through Eily’s skintight stream-of-consciousness voice, which leaves very little room for autonomous perspectives. At times, this may render Eily an untrustworthy narrator, but her acrobatic, muscular prose lends such depth and nuance to the world she inhabits that the reader may be startled to resurface from the spell of her voice only to realize they are indeed in the same Camden flat watching Stephen eat the same cheese sandwich which he has been picking at for the vast majority of the current-time storyline. As an exercise in language, the book sings, illustrating the logic behind the many comparisons of McBride to modernist innovators like Joyce. More problematic is the way McBride’s investment in the immensity of Eily’s interior world is put into service of the plot. The event that has come to sever Stephen and Eily’s intimacy is clearly broadcast throughout the book, yet, when it is revealed in all its gory horror in the final 50 pages, it has very little impact on a reader already emotionally exhausted by Eily’s relentless telling. The freshness of the Modernist project to overturn traditional modes of storytelling doesn’t work in a novel that presents its climactic moment in a more conventional manner, as an epiphany, but arrives there in such discursive fashion that Eily’s darkest secret feels like reiteration rather than revelation. Not even Eily’s frank, electric eroticism can enliven the novel’s overwhelming sense of stagnation as it explores a story that has already been told by characters who have already lived, and relived, its main events.
McBride is a consummate stylist whose individual sentences shine far more brightly than her novel as a whole.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9780571384211
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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