A richly textured portrait of a sometimes luminous, sometimes bleak romance.
A blind lawyer embarks on a stormy affair in this novel.
Blind since ninth grade, young attorney Nick Coleman moves to New York City at the start of the Ronald Reagan presidency to work for the Defenders Alliance, a nonprofit, legal-aid group. He handles appeals for indigent convicts—many of whom seem pretty guilty—and harbors an ambition to write fiction. In a writing class, he meets Caroline Sedlak, a sweet, cheerful, 20-something former leotard model who unobtrusively guides him around town and admires his stories as much as he does hers. Their relationship blossoms—they even manage to weather a stressful sojourn in France. But Nick can’t bring himself to commit, in part because of hints of something off-kilter in Caroline: a past relationship with a drug dealer; an imbroglio with a friend who occupies her apartment; a lack of ambition and direction; and sexual kinks, including her spanking fetish and initiation of a three-way that doesn’t go well. Nick and Caroline drift along until she unexpectedly gets pregnant, and their fraying bond spirals into madness and trauma. In this moody, atmospheric novel, Spratt, himself a blind lawyer, presents a remarkable portrayal of the life of a sightless New Yorker as Nick forms friendships with his hired readers, navigates the metropolis with the help of cohorts and strangers, and feels frustration at his exclusion from a world of shared images. (“There came a point that evening when their admiring asides about Central Park to the north and the sweep of the West Side out to the Hudson depressed me….I turned my attention to my plate, making food my external stimulus, and the moment passed without anyone seeming to notice.”) The author also unravels the slow processes by which friends, family members, and lovers change one another, writing in prose that’s psychologically exacting but infused with poetic resonance. (“I was haunted by an image of Caroline’s back as she trudged along dimly lit, endlessly turning passageways, their walls, floors and ceilings hacked out of subterranean rock. I yearned to catch up to her as she walked wearily but steadily away to declare I loved her.”) The result is a searing look at a troubled relationship.
A richly textured portrait of a sometimes luminous, sometimes bleak romance.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953865-45-8
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Books Fluent
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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