An intriguing but overly technical tale of frustrated love and ambition.
A tech entrepreneur struggles to launch his startup and hold together a tattered relationship with his girlfriend in this novel.
Stuart is a talented software engineer who develops a secure system, COMPASS, that helps clients safely connect to a “distributed cloud infrastructure.” This is an especially unconventional project since it is based on “open software,” the “rebel cult” to which he’s religiously devoted. His work takes him away from San Francisco and his girlfriend, Marie, with whom he suffers a hobbled relationship. He’s singularly obsessed with his career, and she’s equally attached to the prospect of having a child with him, though he seems completely disinterested in fatherhood, a divide sensitively limned by Townsend. Marie misses Stuart in his absence, and suddenly, without announcement, she flies to Seoul to see him, a visit he receives with ambivalent feelings. They move to Singapore together and travel all over Asia, but she’s unhappy—they’re not married, and she has neither a career nor a child to demand her devotion. But since Stuart fails to properly explain his product to prospective clients and at heart Marie is an author, he asks her to ghostwrite a book for him, a task that keeps her busy and at least nominally connected to his preoccupations. Townsend vividly depicts the singular cultural ethos of the tech world—that peculiar combination of microscopically diligent engineering and dreamy aspiration—and deftly dissects its global variations: Much of the tale takes place in Asia. But the tensions that beset Stuart and Marie, while delicately unfurled, are familiar, if not formulaic. In addition, the author draws readers deeply into the technical bowels of Stuart’s work with discussions that are terminologically prohibitive to the uninitiated and likely tedious. There are far too many lines like this one, which is spoken by Stuart: “They might have predictive analytics solutions, but the combination of the core COMPASS platform and the network data we’ve amassed through our MNS offering, together with the machine learning algorithms, will allow us to identify specific patterns and enable us to differentiate our services and emerge front and center in the growing cybersecurity space.”
An intriguing but overly technical tale of frustrated love and ambition.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68463-095-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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
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