A delightful metafictional novel that examines conventions of marriage and love.
A septuagenarian musician and his 30-year-old wife break their silence about the past and share a series of episodic confessions.
White’s latest begins in the year 2050, when Sicilian musician Ruggero Castelnuovo and his American wife, Constance, decide to break a vow they had made to keep their pasts in the dark. Ruggero has already had a slew of marriages and love affairs with men and women alike, while Constance has had two brief marriages. When the couple determines that silence is no longer serving them, they begin to write a series of “confessions” in the form of episodic memoirs, which they take turns reading aloud. Ruggero shares memories of his aristocratic upbringing, his early sexual experiences, and the beginnings of his music career. Along with these reminiscences spill Ruggero’s anxieties about his reputation, which has been compromised by a dramatic and well-publicized affair with the writer Edmund White. Constance, on the other hand, details her parents’ tragic deaths and her subsequent upbringing by her nanny’s family. When she is continuously molested by an uncle figure, she becomes determined to pursue an education at an elite university and never return. For Ruggero, this foundational trauma explains her attraction to significantly older men, including one who robbed her of everything she had and another who humiliated her deeply. Traveling to various locations in Europe and the United States, the couple make life-altering decisions about their relationship as their memoirs address large questions about aging, death, and desire. In crisp but erotically charged prose, White provides a compelling character study that presses on the boundaries of sexuality and romance, polyamory and marriage. The memoirs give the book a unique and immersive structure as the secrets Ruggero and Constance reveal cast light on enigmatic parts of their internal lives and as they negotiate the terms of their marriage.
A delightful metafictional novel that examines conventions of marriage and love.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63557-727-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
IN THE NEWS
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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