A sports novel offering a historical perspective.
A girl in 1970s Brooklyn gets the chance to make her future playing ball in Hill’s debut novel.
Claire Joyce loves basketball. John, one of her brothers, is a high school basketball star, though the kind of ball John and the other boys play is different from the sport available to girls like Claire—only certain “roving” players can move around the whole court in the girls’ games, and they have to wear restrictive uniforms featuring collars, skirts, and belts. Changes may be on the horizon, though: “Congress is looking at a bill that will allow girls to have equal access to sports money in federally funded programs,” John tells her. “If that passes, you might even be able to play basketball and get college funded, too.” Basketball also provides a welcome escape from life at home; Claire and her siblings contend with their alcoholic mother while their father, a cab driver, works nights and sleeps all day. Bobby, another brother, is quiet but prone to sudden acts of violence, while the gentle John increasingly gets into trouble with drugs and the law. Just as John predicted, Title IX goes into effect. Suddenly, girls’ basketball is a big deal—big enough that it might mean Claire could get a college scholarship and escape the claustrophobic environs of Irish Catholic Brooklyn. Hill’s prose is muscular and matter-of-fact, much like the maxims that govern Claire’s actions on the court: “When we’re stupid, we think our shot is the only answer. One of our exercises during official practice is to constantly pass the ball, looking for the open person…The coach always says we have to play smart. Eyes out for the open player. Hold back, measure up, break out.” The plot suffers slightly from a sense of inevitably—Claire’s path is always certain, as is John’s—which gives the pacing a somewhat torpid quality. Even so, Hill captures a watershed moment in the history of sports in a way that highlights how transformative athletics can be, especially in the lives of young women.
A sports novel offering a historical perspective.Pub Date: May 1, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 209
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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