Contrived storytelling outweighs the book’s scattered historical insights.
An aging musician revisits the love affair he had nearly 50 years earlier with the illustrious pianist Vladimir Horowitz.
Midnight in a Zurich cabaret, April 1986, and the piano player, Nico Kaufmann, gets an odd request: play Robert Schumann’s Träumerei. The three-minute miniature is an auditory madeleine for the customer, Reto Donati, a high-profile lawyer who earlier that day skipped out on his dubious appointment to be euthanized after a recording of the song triggered a poignant youthful memory. He has sought out the piano bar “to thank the piece” for saving his life. Träumerei also resonates with Kaufmann because of his association with Horowitz, for whom the piece was a cherished encore. This clavier coincidence is enough that the 70-year-old Kaufmann leaves with the 45-year-old Donati, who takes up residence in Kaufmann’s guest room. For the next two weeks, the duo tour in and around Zurich while Kaufmann relates how he, as a 21-year-old “gigolo,” met the 33-year-old Horowitz in 1937 and became his student and lover. The affair persisted more than two years—against the wishes of Kaufmann’s father, Horowitz’s wife, even Horowitz‘s own neuroses. Singer, the pen name of German cultural historian Eva Gesine Baur, had access to the real Kaufmann’s unpublished archives, including letters from Horowitz, which perhaps explains why her book never settles into either a conventional retelling of Kaufmann‘s life or the novel enticingly introduced in the first two chapters. Donati’s story is relegated to infrequent, often jarring, intrusions, mostly in the form of one-note expository characters, like his jilted, golf club–wielding fiancee; or facile verbal proddings, á la “What were you thinking that whole time?” This short shrift is a shame, because Donati’s tale of suppressed love, what little is dribbled out, seems much more fertile ground for compelling fiction.
Contrived storytelling outweighs the book’s scattered historical insights.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-939931-86-3
Page Count: 230
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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