A thrilling depiction of the power of music.
Driven young people face off at a prestigious Japanese piano competition in this propulsive and poetic novel.
While moving smoothly among multiple points of view, Onda concentrates on four of the more unusual contestants. Aya Eiden, now 20, was an up-and-coming pianist when her mother died seven years earlier and hasn't played professionally since. Ambitious Japanese Peruvian Masaru Carlos Levi Anatole, a Juilliard student, knew Aya when they were both kids in Tokyo. Akashi Takashima, 28, is the oldest of the competitors and has been working in a music store, while precocious and startling 16-year-old Jin Kazama, the “Honeybee Prince,” has been traveling the world helping his beekeeper father and has never had a piano of his own, though he has been nurtured by recently deceased maestro Yuji Von Hoffmann since the age of 5. As the competition proceeds through four taut rounds, eliminating contestants liberally along the way, Onda places the reader not only in the position of those playing a particular piece, but often in the minds of several observers, each with their own take on the style and effect of the playing. She pays particular attention to how her four key players affect each other, both personally and musically, but also broadens out to include the perspectives of, among others, the stage manager, a couple of the judges, many of the other competitors, the florist with whom Jin stays while at the competition, the piano tuner, and the composer whose new work all the contestants are required to play. Setting the novel during the two weeks of the competition both gives the novel a solid structure and adds suspense, and the author's clear passion for and knowledge of the classical repertoire shine through. Even readers with no prior affection for the works played in the competition should be tantalized into taking a listen by Onda's descriptions of the music and its effects on listeners; one piece sounds like “a fluffy, plumped-up quilt, cushiony, as well as slightly damp” and another like a “thick, rough-hewn log. Unvarnished, unworked, the beauty of the grain visible.”
A thrilling depiction of the power of music.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781639364039
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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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