A dark, affecting tale of the desire to connect.
A lonely man develops a long-distance attachment to a stranger in this debut literary novel.
When he was 12 years old, Doug Faraday moved in with his aunt in Maryland after a traumatic family event left his father in prison and his mother unable to care for the tween. Doug never really got over what happened—he is still plagued by bad dreams at night—and he never adjusted to his new home, where his cousins kept him at a distance and the kids at school bullied him mercilessly. At 18, the bookish Doug comes across the LiveJournal of Courtney Bressler, a young woman his age living in Illinois. Doug becomes a voracious reader of Courtney’s blog—a combination of photographs, movie reviews, and irreverent updates on her life—and continues to follow her from afar for years. As he struggles with isolation, depression, and thoughts of suicide, Courtney’s social media accounts offer the lone consistent bright spot in Doug’s existence. Can Courtney (unbeknown to her) save Doug from his own bleakest instincts and help him come to terms with the tragedy that haunts his past? Or will Doug’s desires lead him to try to make their imagined relationship a real one? The novel covers the course of 15 years, during which Rouleau adeptly charts the maturation of older millennials, from anti–George W. Bush angst, Razer phones, and viral videos through to the present ennui. His prose is simple but closely calibrated to Doug’s discomfort, as here where the protagonist meets a woman for an awkward date: “Their orders arrived shortly afterwards. As the minutes crawled by, the conversation became more and more scarce, and Doug grew increasingly certain that once they were finished eating, they would say their perfunctory goodbyes, and that he would never see or hear from Leah again.” The book is not as creepy as the premise suggests. Rather, it gets at a very contemporary sort of loneliness—not only Doug’s hikikomori-like existence, but also Courtney’s one-sided affirmational exhibitionism. Many readers of a certain age will see themselves in these characters, blundering quietly through the years in search of the lives they might have had.
A dark, affecting tale of the desire to connect.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 169
Publisher: Peter Rouleau
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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