This subtle collection is elegant, honest, and empowering.
Eight stories of ordinary women living complex lives can also be seen as eight stories of complex women living ordinary lives.
In these stories, set largely in Seoul, Korean women ranging in age from 10 to 80 navigate the everyday with a quiet determination to allow themselves joy. Often, the stories give the reader insight into family dynamics in the context of the larger society’s repression. In the collection’s tender opening story, “Under the Plum Tree,” the narrator’s oldest sister, Geumju, is set adrift from a life controlled by the labor of duty by Alzheimer’s disease, finally affording her time to enjoy simple pleasures. In “Runaway,” the narrator’s elderly father runs away from home in order to “start living [his] life” in the years he has left. Though his children and their mother are at first distraught, the father’s absence allows them the space to reveal themselves to each other as fully rounded humans, rather than automatons fulfilling their familial roles. Other stories take on the foundational misogyny of a patriarchal culture more directly: In “Grown-up Girl,” a woman who self-identities as a feminist finds herself conflicted by the way her high school aged daughter stands against unwanted sexual attention. In the sublime “Night of Aurora,” an aging woman struggles with her aversion to being asked to help raise her grandson as society expects, while her daughter struggles with her own aversion to quitting work to dedicate herself solely to motherhood. Throughout the collection floats the specter of Miss Kim—a model for the possibilities of Korean womanhood who is sometimes an icon for the rights of women to live self-determined lives, sometimes a literal incarnation of the invisibility of women’s labor, and sometimes a foil for the narrator’s own complicated feelings about gender roles, duty, aging, and the relationships between mothers and daughters. Spare but never stark, weary but never despairing, Cho’s trim prose examines the under-seen world of women with a keen appreciation for all the possibilities for their lives—including the ones they themselves may not be able to imagine.
This subtle collection is elegant, honest, and empowering.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781324095316
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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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