A summery read packed tight with quirky characters and their ongoing foibles.
A young veterinarian travels to a distant island to study tortoises and finds more than she’d bargained for.
In her latest novel, Segal has whipped together a fictional island, Tuga, “the size of an English county,” that is its own “miniature world, a British Overseas Territory…founded on the principles of compassionate collectivism by a series of deliberate arrivals, terrible calamities and happy accidents.” The book starts with a young research veterinarian, Charlotte Walker, sailing from London to Tuga for a fellowship to study the endangered gold coin tortoises native to the island. She gets off to a rocky start: There’s overwhelming seasickness, for one thing, and, for another, the handsome young doctor she meets on the ship turns out to be not quite as available as he’d first presented himself. But once Charlotte gets used to the “bugs and creepy crawlies and biting things, and the terrifying isolation and claustrophobia when all around the sea roiled and there was no way on or off, just water and sky and the purgatorial emptiness of that unbroken horizon,” she quickly finds herself falling in love with both the island and its inhabitants. As a reader, it’s hard to resist falling in love right alongside Charlotte. Instead of driving, island residents get around by catching a ride on a donkey; there’s also a single taxi driven by a man who calls himself “Taxi,” who also serves as the only radio announcer. Then there’s a pair of prepubescent best friends, Annie and Alex, who run roughshod over the island and whose devotion to each other is sweetly moving. Charlotte soon finds herself enmeshed in much more than she’d bargained for—including the mystery of her own paternity. If the book has any flaws, it’s that not every character has been fully fleshed out—some of the more minor personalities can seem a bit flat. But the primary joy of this delicious book is still in getting to know the island’s peculiar characters, whom Segal treats with a gentle, quirky sort of amusement.
A summery read packed tight with quirky characters and their ongoing foibles.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780063360457
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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