A gripping, richly layered story of a woman’s unraveling as she grapples with threats both past and present.
In this haunting debut, a woman running from her past tries to find solitude and independence in the woods.
Laura Mantovani has spent several months living in a cabin in the mountains above an Italian village. There, she walks in the forest, reads, and tends to the small home she has fashioned for herself. Interactions with the locals are limited to brief errands and odd jobs, such as translations and tutoring, and though she is not accepted fully, she seems to command some level of respect from those she meets. This distance is threatened, however, when she takes a lover—a bartender who visits her at night and is eager to keep their relationship a secret. The secrecy suits Laura, who has secrets of her own she’d like to keep from the village; she’s hiding from an abusive and controlling husband. When a friend from her previous life appears at her door, Laura’s carefully constructed world begins to come apart. Wracked by illness and increasingly dependent on laudanum, she retreats into herself and the woods, unable to see the growing discontent the villagers have with the strange woman who appears increasingly unmoored. At under 200 pages, this tight novel doesn’t have much room for revelations to be overly drawn out, including a flashback to the days preceding Laura’s decision to run away from her marriage. Bromwich’s pacing works brilliantly; languid and slow as we meet Laura a few months into her time in the cabin, comfortable and familiar, before becoming increasingly disjointed and rapid to match her deteriorating mental state. Awkward interactions with locals give way to jarring and difficult exchanges in which Laura, from whose perspective the story is told, struggles to comprehend the growing animosity from even those with whom she was nominally friendly. The result is a slow-burning tension that never quite resolves into something like closure but is nonetheless riveting and original.
A gripping, richly layered story of a woman’s unraveling as she grapples with threats both past and present.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781953387318
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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