Fans of Younger are better off waiting for the show to return to the small screen.
In the sequel to Younger (2005), now a popular TV series, former publishing professional Liza Miller finds herself grappling with what it really means to be older.
Liza is about to turn 50, but she's still dealing with the effects of the years she spent pretending to be younger. Readers meet Liza two years after the events of the first book, now sequestered at a cabin in Maine. Thanks to her daughter Caitlin’s pregnancy, Liza is preparing to return to New York City, but this time with no home, no job, and no romantic prospects. That is, until Liza’s friend and former co-worker Kelsey—now working in Hollywood—decides she wants to turn Liza’s thinly veiled novel, Younger, into a TV series. This is when things start to get meta—real-life Younger stars Sutton Foster and Debi Mazar are mentioned as prospective cast members, blurring the lines between reality and fiction in a way fans will find amusing. Of course, the book goes a different route, picking flighty fictional actress Stella Power to play Liza and international superstar Hugo Fielding to play her male boss, allowing these two new characters to become the catalysts for much of the book’s personal and professional drama. But as Liza attempts to balance shooting the series with caring for Caitlin, figuring out her growing feelings for Hugo, and examining her continuing attraction to ex-boyfriend Josh, it can feel like the book is simultaneously doing too much and not enough. The plot wades into issues of motherhood, career, and aging but never dives in fully, and attempts at lighthearted moments like Liza’s ill-advised use of hallucinogenic mushrooms feel out of place.
Fans of Younger are better off waiting for the show to return to the small screen.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982142-94-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Sure to enchant even those who have never played a video game in their lives, with instant cult status for those who have.
The adventures of a trio of genius kids united by their love of gaming and each other.
When Sam Masur recognizes Sadie Green in a crowded Boston subway station, midway through their college careers at Harvard and MIT, he shouts, “SADIE MIRANDA GREEN. YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY!” This is a reference to the hundreds of hours—609 to be exact—the two spent playing “Oregon Trail” and other games when they met in the children’s ward of a hospital where Sam was slowly and incompletely recovering from a traumatic injury and where Sadie was secretly racking up community service hours by spending time with him, a fact which caused the rift that has separated them until now. They determine that they both still game, and before long they’re spending the summer writing a soon-to-be-famous game together in the apartment that belongs to Sam's roommate, the gorgeous, wealthy acting student Marx Watanabe. Marx becomes the third corner of their triangle, and decades of action ensue, much of it set in Los Angeles, some in the virtual realm, all of it riveting. A lifelong gamer herself, Zevin has written the book she was born to write, a love letter to every aspect of gaming. For example, here’s the passage introducing the professor Sadie is sleeping with and his graphic engine, both of which play a continuing role in the story: “The seminar was led by twenty-eight-year-old Dov Mizrah....It was said of Dov that he was like the two Johns (Carmack, Romero), the American boy geniuses who'd programmed and designed Commander Keen and Doom, rolled into one. Dov was famous for his mane of dark, curly hair, wearing tight leather pants to gaming conventions, and yes, a game called Dead Sea, an underwater zombie adventure, originally for PC, for which he had invented a groundbreaking graphics engine, Ulysses, to render photorealistic light and shadow in water.” Readers who recognize the references will enjoy them, and those who don't can look them up and/or simply absorb them. Zevin’s delight in her characters, their qualities, and their projects sprinkles a layer of fairy dust over the whole enterprise.
Sure to enchant even those who have never played a video game in their lives, with instant cult status for those who have.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32120-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A delightful and surprising story of a woman drawn through life by curiosity.
Time is fractured in this story of a woman’s life as a child, college student, and 20-something set against the development of the atomic bomb and efforts to land the first man on the moon.
When Annie Fisk was a child growing up in New Mexico, she had a best friend, Diana, who would appear and disappear in her backyard. A number of small trinkets appeared and disappeared in the same way. As Annie grew up, she decided her friend must have been imaginary, and she never told her mother or her father—a physicist working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos—about it. After her father’s death and her graduation from high school, Annie headed to college in San Antonio, where she met and fell in love with Evelyn, a fellow college student with dreams of being a painter. But, drawn by an imaginary thread, Annie leaves Evelyn after graduation to move to Houston, with the goal of working for NASA. And she does—starting as a secretary, and then moving into programming. What begins as a straightforward story veers into science fiction territory almost unexpectedly as Annie discovers a wormhole and begins to research and test the implications of that finding with a colleague. Explorations of love, loss, science, and the edges of the universe and what is—and is not—possible in the space-time continuum collide in this story; it's reminiscent of the thoughtfulness, matter-of-fact science, and female strength of Connie Willis’ well-known time traveling series beginning with Doomsday Book (1992) as well as the world portrayed in Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures (2016).
A delightful and surprising story of a woman drawn through life by curiosity.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780593543887
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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