A satirical recipe that manages to turn sour, mismatched ingredients into something feather-light, affable, and sweet.
A perpetually put-upon English professor is drafted to chaperone a student trip to England, with predictably disastrous if comical results.
Schumacher’s previous chronicles about the perils of academia—Dear Committee Members (2014) and The Shakespeare Requirement (2018)—levy herculean challenges upon Jason Fitger, our beleaguered hero, which are off-putting in their injustice if often laugh-out-loud hilarious. Fortunately, she seems to be easing up on Payne University’s least-favorite son, even if his high-strung superciliousness and propensity for accidents remain unchanged. In this third installment, Fitger has been recruited (read: blackmailed) to lead a three-week “Experience: Abroad” to London and other iconic U.K. locations during a soggy January excursion. His absence from home thankfully leads to less fretting about his academic standing at the backwater Midwestern college where he chairs the English department. However, Fitger is typically anxious about his ex-wife Janet Matthias’ potential job with a university in Chicago and her looming absence from his life. There are plenty of new oddballs to fill the space, as Fitger’s charges are a wonderfully weird mix of exiles from the Island of Misfit Toys. Payne University’s dirty dozen include a mismatched and hot-tempered couple, a student disappointed to learn he’s not on his way to the Caribbean, and a pair of artistic twins reminiscent of The Shining. On the more extreme end, Fitger finds himself the target of a prelaw student whose major requires study abroad, “which has historically been about young white Americans losing their virginity and learning how to use the salad fork.” He also worries about the delicacy of a future cat lady; mentors a goth-y undergrad and a juvenile delinquent; and ponders the whereabouts of a student so absent he’s found his way to mainland Europe. Along the way, Schumacher continues the series’ epistolatory theme with student essays about experiences ranging from the consumption of a Scotch egg to equally unsavory field trips to Oxford, Stonehenge, and Bath.
A satirical recipe that manages to turn sour, mismatched ingredients into something feather-light, affable, and sweet.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780385550123
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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