A deeply felt, refreshingly honest story of two friends finding their ways down different paths.
Widely translated Mexican author Nettel considers the thorniness of motherhood in this novel shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Is motherhood worth it? For Laura, the answer’s always been a resounding no: “For years I tried to convince my girlfriends that procreating was a hopeless mistake.” Children “would always represent a limit on their freedom.” Since their 20s, her friend Alina has agreed. Independent, busy traveling, the two look askance at the societal expectations women face. Later, settled in Mexico City, Laura has her tubes tied. Then, shockingly, Alina announces she’s trying to get pregnant. What happens next is every prospective parent’s worst nightmare: Alina learns there’s a grave problem with her baby, who won’t live past birth. Running parallel to Alina’s story is that of Doris, Laura’s widowed neighbor, whose young son throws daily violent tantrums. As Laura tries to support Alina through an impossibly difficult situation, she’s drawn to her struggling neighbor’s troubled son as well as to a local feminist collective, finding herself reconsidering ideas of motherhood, family, even “frequently illogical, incomprehensible” love itself. A pair of pigeons nest on her balcony and raise an ungainly chick that looks nothing like them; Laura becomes convinced another bird laid the egg, practicing brood parasitism. Nettel describes the realities of her characters’ lives with a compassionate but unsparing eye. Every mother depicted is fully human, not selfless and saintly but a complex individual with mixed, even contradictory feelings. There’s joy here and camaraderie, but there are no easy solutions. “I don’t understand…” Alina tells Laura at one point. “And in her voice, [Laura] thought [she] could hear, not indignation, or even bewilderment, but simply all the despair in the world.”
A deeply felt, refreshingly honest story of two friends finding their ways down different paths.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781639730032
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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