A striking study of a woman on the verge.
The provocative British novelist imagines his mother’s complex inner life.
As a child, Self briefly lived in Ithaca, New York, where his father, John, taught at Cornell and his mother, Elaine, served as her husband’s well-read assistant. This book, covering roughly a year in the family’s life there in 1954 and 1955, is inspired by his mother’s diary and tracks Elaine as she ponders motherhood, squandered ambitions, and (especially) infidelity. She dwells on what she suspects about John, naturally, but also on her own flings, mainly with Ted Troppmann, one of John’s professorial colleagues. Marriage is just one institution that makes her feel constrained: The day-to-day business of running a household chafes, forcing her to suppress her own intellectual ambitions, and though she loves her preadolescent son, Billy, motherhood alone does little for her. Self has long been an admirer of the modernists, and stylistically this novel strongly recalls Mrs. Dalloway, as Elaine’s mind flits from place to place and an overall mood of dissatisfaction sets in (“bitterness, pain, confusion, and sadness in the sightless, senseless, grimacing face of the act of love”). It also gets deeply intimate with Elaine physically, from lust to migraines to periods to bouts of heavy drinking. The novel is a smart portrait of starchy academia and literary life (Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow have brief cameos) and how misogyny runs at the core of society, sometimes violently so. But its chief strength is as a showcase of a woman who’s had it up to here with good manners (she is “a diary keeper and a diary burner, an unfaithful wife and an unloving mother, an angry gouger and a hysterical screamer”). The digressive, at times rambling, prose that’s long been common for Self is present, but there’s no question that his chosen subject has focused his mind.
A striking study of a woman on the verge.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780802163530
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
