A gripping, richly layered story of a woman’s unraveling as she grapples with threats both past and present.
In this haunting debut, a woman running from her past tries to find solitude and independence in the woods.
Laura Mantovani has spent several months living in a cabin in the mountains above an Italian village. There, she walks in the forest, reads, and tends to the small home she has fashioned for herself. Interactions with the locals are limited to brief errands and odd jobs, such as translations and tutoring, and though she is not accepted fully, she seems to command some level of respect from those she meets. This distance is threatened, however, when she takes a lover—a bartender who visits her at night and is eager to keep their relationship a secret. The secrecy suits Laura, who has secrets of her own she’d like to keep from the village; she’s hiding from an abusive and controlling husband. When a friend from her previous life appears at her door, Laura’s carefully constructed world begins to come apart. Wracked by illness and increasingly dependent on laudanum, she retreats into herself and the woods, unable to see the growing discontent the villagers have with the strange woman who appears increasingly unmoored. At under 200 pages, this tight novel doesn’t have much room for revelations to be overly drawn out, including a flashback to the days preceding Laura’s decision to run away from her marriage. Bromwich’s pacing works brilliantly; languid and slow as we meet Laura a few months into her time in the cabin, comfortable and familiar, before becoming increasingly disjointed and rapid to match her deteriorating mental state. Awkward interactions with locals give way to jarring and difficult exchanges in which Laura, from whose perspective the story is told, struggles to comprehend the growing animosity from even those with whom she was nominally friendly. The result is a slow-burning tension that never quite resolves into something like closure but is nonetheless riveting and original.
A gripping, richly layered story of a woman’s unraveling as she grapples with threats both past and present.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781953387318
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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