A quiet, endearing novel about a woman who refuses to go gently into her golden years.
An elderly woman decides to take care of some long overdue business in Boerner’s latest novel.
Eighty-one-year-old Bernice Hart doesn’t want to move into her daughter’s carriage house in Atlanta. She’s lived in her cottage in the small Arkansas town of Savage Crossing for six decades—she raised two children there and buried a son and a husband—and if she has to leave it, she’s going to do it her way even if that means she’s running away without a word to anyone: “She would slip away undetected, not in search of one last great adventure, nor as an attention-seeking antic sure to upset her family. Bernice had only one goal: She wanted to live out the remainder of her life on her own terms.” With her car (Miss Fiona) packed with only her dearest possessions and her cat, Dolly Parton, Bernice hits the road for Lake Norfork in the Ozarks, the place where she used to go on vacation as a teen. She has unfinished business there related to the first man she ever loved, the aptly named John Marvel. But is an old woman with a bad hip and a slipping memory really up to a quest of such magnitude? Boerner’s evocative prose expertly captures what it’s like to be in Bernice’s head: “Old Bernice would never have spent a moment on her porch in Savage Crossing on a chilly November morning, but new Bernice was plenty warm wearing her wool coat over her flannel nightgown….How many things had Bernice not done because she had been too tired or too cold or too worried? She hated to imagine it.” The novel unfurls at a leisurely pace—as leisurely as an octogenarian puttering along in a car called Miss Fiona—and it goes on about 50 pages too long. Its unhurriedness is part of its charm, however. While the story never goes anywhere too surprising, it succeeds in capturing a certain time of life and the way the past never seems to loosen its grip on the present.
A quiet, endearing novel about a woman who refuses to go gently into her golden years.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-951418-06-9
Page Count: 403
Publisher: One Mississippi Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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