A high school sports tale with a familiar arc and a richly rendered milieu.
In this debut novel, a young football coach puts the hopes of a West Virginia town on his shoulders.
Alderson, West Virginia, 1936. The Depression has brought its share of pain to the small, rural town, but the single greatest cause of suffering may be the fact that the local high school football team hasn’t won a game in two years. Last season, the team didn’t even score a single touchdown. Narrator Billy Shelton puts it this way: “I read an article once in a National Geographic magazine which said that every culture in the world has initiation rituals to define the moment when a boy becomes a man.…In West Virginia culture, the rite of passage which separated the men from the boys was football.” Fifteen-year-old Billy, a milk delivery boy with an ailing father, just wants a shot to prove himself on the gridiron. That shot may have just arrived in the form of the new football coach, 27-year-old Alexander Arbuckle McLaughlin. Coach, as everyone calls him, recently built a successful program elsewhere, and Billy and his teammates have hopes he can bring that magic to Alderson. But can one man really inspire a down-on-its-luck town to get back on its feet? Smith’s prose captures the language and texture of the setting. Here, Billy describes foraging for a local delicacy: “Picking Chinquapins is a tricky business, though. That’s why they aren’t grown commercially. First, you have to find them before the squirrels and birds get them. Second, the nuts are covered by a prickly bur. Getting a nut out of an unopen bur is difficult. You have to put it on the ground and roll it under your shoe.” The author includes wonderful period details, like the Farm Women’s Club setting up looms in the school’s gymnasium in order to weave rugs and blankets there during the summer. These slice-of-life moments are the book’s strongest asset, helping to sharpen what is otherwise a fairly standard and predictable sports story. Readers with ties to West Virginia may be the most suitable audience for this novel flecked with vivid local color.
A high school sports tale with a familiar arc and a richly rendered milieu.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 979-8429169200
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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