A compelling—if slightly melodramatic—portrait of youth, love, and a lost era of New York.
After the death of a former friend, a Brooklyn couple finds their lives beginning to unravel.
In his second novel, author and memoirist Goodwillie paints a captivatingly vivid portrait of young love in New York in the early 2000s. Drawn by the promise of the city, Audrey and Theo are a creative couple who both escaped their respective dead-end towns and broken families. Struggling to make it in Bushwick, Audrey, a jack-of-all-trades for a well-known indie label, and Theo, a literary scout for a Hollywood production company, seem like polar opposites at first. After meeting at a concert, they fall into a deep love built on trust and devoid of secrets—or so they thought. When Audrey hears a rumor that someone from her past jumped off the Williamsburg Bridge, her life and relationship start to come apart at the seams. An old secret rises to the surface, putting Audrey and Theo in danger. The novel’s characterizations of people—from Brooklyn musicians to Upper East Siders—and the city itself are its biggest strength: “It had taken [Theo] a decade to gain his footing, but New York was funny that way. Occasionally, he thought he understood the city in a profound way. Most of the time he was confused about everything.” It’s a simple yet perfect encapsulation of the perpetual intimacy and elusiveness of Manhattan. Goodwillie’s writing is full of not only impressive detail and fondness, but also self-awareness: “Audrey and Theo were not true pioneers. They’d arrived, instead, with the first swell of settlers, and had watched with timeworn gentrifiers' dismay as the swells became waves.” Throughout the novel, the Occupy movement beats wildly in the background, and the pages are littered with current and lost locales like Café Loup, Saint Vitus and Balthazar. Aside from the plot (which sometimes falls on the overdramatic side), the novel is a panoramic time capsule of youth and self-discovery in the aughts in New York City.
A compelling—if slightly melodramatic—portrait of youth, love, and a lost era of New York.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9213-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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