by Francesca Marciano ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
Emotionally charged issues of commitment, loyalty, and trust explored with dry yet oddly comforting European wit.
Marciano's latest is made up of six longish stories set mostly in a vibrantly described Rome, often involving animals as pets or predators.
“Terrible Things Could Happen To Us,” about the ripple effect of an unexpected death, sucks the reader in immediately. Told from the multiple viewpoints of the dead man’s wife, her married lover, the lover’s wife, and both couples’ children, who are unhappily aware of their parents’ secrets, the story has a layered structure that gives it the rich, leisurely feel of a Fellini film. Though narrowly focused on two characters, “The Girl” also feels larger than its form. A young woman recently out of rehab apprentices with a circus snake charmer who hopes to charm her into loving him. He fails but years later rediscovers her in a satisfyingly bittersweet conclusion. The title story that follows is actually the book’s weakest. It cleverly contrasts the tensions between two couples—one newly minted, the other long-standing—who share a vacation cottage. But a lost puppy becomes the too-obvious metaphor for domestic bliss, and the resolution feels pat. In “Indian Land,” “the fragility of nature” more successfully reflects human fragility as a happily married woman leaves her husband in Rome to aid an ex-lover having a nervous breakdown in New Mexico (described with gorgeous affection). In “There Might Be Blood,” a New Yorker takes a two-month break from her troubled marriage to live in Rome. When hostile sea gulls beset her terrace, she hires a sea gull remover and finds herself obsessed, “like being in love,” with his hawk. Avian aggression exposes marital truths the woman has been avoiding. In the final story, “The Call Back,” an American film director in Rome meets the woman who inadvertently caused his older sister’s death 25 years earlier. Death’s lasting power echoes back through the stories, but Marciano’s closing lines offer hard-won hope.
Emotionally charged issues of commitment, loyalty, and trust explored with dry yet oddly comforting European wit.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4815-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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by Jodi Picoult ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2024
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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New York Times Bestseller
by Liz Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2024
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.
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New York Times Bestseller
Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.
One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593418918
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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