Full of ideas, plot, verve, interesting scenes, and good writing, but just a little too full. A writer to watch.
A small-town Maine librarian gets into a peck of trouble.
Plot #1: Maeve Cosgrove is called to her supervisor’s office, where a woman from the Office of Family and Child Services has come to talk to her. One of the library’s regular visitors, a teen named Libby, has filed a complaint: Maeve has been watching her have sex with a boy in one of the library’s bathroom stalls. The girl is in foster care, and the boy is developmentally delayed, and Maeve insists it didn’t happen, but eventually it seems it more or less did, sort of. Maeve might be let off the hook, but if she wasn’t obsessed with the girl before, she certainly is now, and then she loses her job anyway, supposedly due to budget cuts. Welcome to Plot #2: Maeve has been writing letters to Harrison Riddles, a famous author who summers in Maine. She’s told him all about her beloved library and co-workers. Now, it turns out, he’s going to write a book based on the life of Willie, a Sudanese refugee who’s the boyfriend of Maeve’s fellow librarian Katrina. Since Maeve’s husband is perennially out of town on business and her daughter has flown the nest, Maeve, now jobless, is available to get very tangled up in this other situation. It takes a while to sink in that she is not an easy person to root for, but once it does, it complicates an already overcomplicated book, which touches on everything from abuse and empathy to literary appropriation, ventriloquizing, and the idea of the Magical Negro. A few chapters are narrated in first person by the characters, and toward the end the book floats the idea that it’s been authored by a real-life Maeve, hiding her secrets “in plain sight,” and then a strange last chapter suggests—well, you’ll have to figure it out.
Full of ideas, plot, verve, interesting scenes, and good writing, but just a little too full. A writer to watch.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781324051046
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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
The mystery plot and the Italian idyl both play supporting roles in this fairy tale for grownups.
Scottoline’s latest links her great love of Italy with her long record of female-centered crime fiction.
Julia Pritzker has a presentiment that something terrible is around the corner, but she never imagines just how terrible: When her husband, Philadelphia attorney Mike Shallette, tries to protect her from a man who grabs her designer bag, he gets stabbed to death before her eyes. Julia’s grief becomes laced with guilt when she realizes that her daily horoscope had predicted a calamity she’s now convinced she could have prevented. The news from Italian attorney Massimiliano Lombardi that his late client has left her millions in cash and an estate worth nearly as much again doesn’t comfort her, but it does provide distraction—especially since she’s never heard of Emilia Rossi and has no idea why she’s been chosen as her heir. Since Julia, adopted at an early age by a couple who’ve been dead for years, wonders if Emilia might have been her biological grandmother, she travels to Chianti in hope of recovering some of Emilia’s DNA. Unfortunately, caretakers Anna Mattia Vesta and Piero Fano have burned all of Emilia’s clothing and personal items on her orders, so there’s nothing left to test. Growing convinced that the stars are directing her and that her history is rooted in Emilia’s decrepit house, Julia turns down repeated offers for the property and resolves to secure evidence confirming the relationship between Emilia and her. Now all she has to do is protect herself from the shadowy figures tracking and following her and recover from a series of vivid, hallucinatory nightmares that seem to be the cost of claiming her heritage.
The mystery plot and the Italian idyl both play supporting roles in this fairy tale for grownups.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781538769997
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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