Despite compelling explorations of monstrous impulses in women, this dark bedtime story cannot see the forest for the trees.
The woods call to three generations of mothers and daughters in this dual-timeline modern fairy tale.
In a Michigan tourist town, Virginia Cassata and her daughter, Gemma, live above an antique shop bordering the woods. Every day, Gemma is drawn to wander the fairies’ forest, and every night Virginia steals away her memories with an enchanted hairbrush. Desperate to protect her daughter while also thwarting a witch’s curse, Virginia will let this selfish magic rip her apart if it means keeping Gemma close. Fifteen years prior, Clarice and her daughter, Virginia, live above an antique shop bordering the woods. Every day, Virginia is drawn to wander the fairies’ forest, but rather than erase her recollections, Clarice scares her into staying away—until Virginia falls in love. The consequences of this human-fairy coupling ripple forward and backward in time, reflecting Clarice’s own unrequited desires and enticing the Slit Witch, who curses the family with ruin by Gemma’s 15th birthday. When the witch captures Virginia, Gemma must follow half-remembered steps to embrace her fey heritage. “It’s an old story, isn’t it?” Virginia, perennially caught in the middle as both daughter and mother, muses. “The sins of the mother, repeated, because the daughter tricks herself into believing that she can save her own daughter from the ache of regret.” Wees’ contemporary fairy-tale language favors layered repetition of motifs over narrative plot twists, which lessens the emotional impact of Gemma discovering these secrets and lies by omission. Inspired worldbuilding details, like Clarice offering up human-wrought antiques to be enchanted by the fascinated fairies, are sorely underutilized, especially for a story that tracks three generations in the same setting. While the epic quest transforms all three by the end, the reader may feel unfulfilled.
Despite compelling explorations of monstrous impulses in women, this dark bedtime story cannot see the forest for the trees.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780593357521
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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