Like all the best fairy tales: nostalgic with an undercurrent of darkness.
Three lost souls search for a missing woman.
When best friends Ralph “Rafe” Howell and Jeremy Cox were teenagers, they went missing in the woods of West Virginia for six months. Now, 15 years later, the two are estranged. Rafe lives in a cabin and spends his days hunting, painting, and being generally hermitic. Jeremy has an uncanny, almost supernatural ability to find lost people, and spends his time finding lost girls. Enter Emilie Wendell. Emilie’s adoptive mother recently died and, in her search to ease her loneliness, Emilie uploaded her DNA to a website that matched her with a half-sister she didn’t know existed. Here’s the catch: Emilie’s sister, Shannon Yates, went missing years ago in the same forest as Rafe and Jeremy. Emilie shows up to a TV interview Jeremy is doing and demands he help find her sister. Jeremy agrees and reveals a secret: Shannon, better known to him as Skya, is the queen of a magical land called Shanandoah. As it turns out, Jeremy and Rafe weren’t lost in the woods those many years ago but were spending their days galivanting around the secret magical kingdom whose entrance is in the forest. To return they need to enlist the help of Rafe, whose memories of Shanandoah and, more heartbreakingly, the love he held for Jeremy were erased when they left the magical world. After quite a bit of convincing, Rafe reluctantly agrees to help. What unfolds is an adventure filled with sword fights, romance, and gut-wrenching stories of the dark past that led the boys to the forest in the first place. Shaffer’s depictions of Emilie and Skya fall almost completely flat. That said, she makes up for it with the tender love between Jeremy and Rafe and the magical depiction of the world they once left behind.
Like all the best fairy tales: nostalgic with an undercurrent of darkness.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780593598870
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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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