A somewhat predictable but strangely alluring tale of post-Covid love.
In Murray’s novella, a marketing consultant finds that post-pandemic New York City’s online dating scene is much more than he bargained for—and that it could cost him dearly.
As the story opens, it’s 2021, and 50-year-old Matthew is on his very first date after the start of the Covid-19 lockdown. His companion, Samantha, suddenly grabs his hands and squeezes tight: “What’s wrong?” she asks. “You don’t like me touching you?” Things are moving a little too quickly for the masked Matthew, and he immediately recoils from the contact. “Take off your mask and kiss me on the lips,” a thoroughly disgruntled Samantha presses further; before long, she tells him that she’s unvaccinated. Matthew begs off, and the date is effectively over. “Listen Matthew, you’re a handsome guy, but you’re not my type,” Samantha announces. “I’m sure of it.” Matthew lives a sedate and sober existence, and he hasn’t had a long-term relationship in years; he’s in a vulnerable spot when another date, Stacy, upends his life. She’s an unemployed 45-year-old woman with a trust fund, too much time on her hands, and a curiously unexplored fixation on her often-married father. Still, the very attractive Stacy easily insinuates herself into Matthew’s psyche, despite their obvious lack of chemistry from the start. She’s upfront about her struggles with depression, which Matthew appreciates, but he continually—and perplexingly—ignores a red flag: her avowed aversion to healthy relationships. Indeed, her litany of troubles with old boyfriends doesn’t seem to concern Matthew at all; he’s more than willing, for instance, to accompany Stacy on a late-night stroll around Riverside Park, immediately after her former beau, a troubled saxophone player named Hunter, accosts them in a bar.
None of this matters very much, though, because Murray manages to build effective tension and drama through the use of economical and direct dialogue. Each exchange between Stacy and Matthew ends with an anticipation of danger, consistently propelling the story forward. Like a savvy musician who knows the value of not playing too much, the author generates a palpable sense of impending calamity with the notes he elects to leave out, as when Matthew suggests to Stacy in Riverside Park that they should go back to her apartment: “Stacy kissed me again. ‘No. Not yet. Not yet. Let’s try to enjoy this moment fully.’” However, if there’s one area where Murray falters, it’s in his crafting of a decidedly less-than-bombastic climax. The trajectory of Matthew’s journey with Stacy is easy to predict, and its endpoint is ultimately unsurprising, when all is said and done. However, this may not be the best way to evaluate Murray’s adventure. After all, no piece of music can be rightly evaluated on its conclusion alone; rather, one must take into account the experience of listening to it and the feelings that it evokes. The author’s lean story structure hits enough intriguing notes to keep readers’ attention, even if they can probably predict how the final stanza will sound.
A somewhat predictable but strangely alluring tale of post-Covid love.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2022
ISBN: 9798352202890
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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