An emotionally honest story about a struggle for balance.
A novel about a tough-minded expatriate who feels overshadowed by her spouse’s career.
Maxfield’s debut novel opens as Em and her husband, Gee, are considering relocating to China for Gee’s job. In the past, his career has taken them to South Korea, Japan, and France, with stints at their American home port of Los Angeles. Life on the road might seem exotic and exciting to many, but it’s a challenge for Em. She’s put her own marketing career on hold and is never anywhere long enough to make deep or lasting friendships. Gee’s time is monopolized by work whether they’re overseas or not, and their kids resent living lives of constant change. On a tour of Shanghai with Gee, Em asks about the city’s deterioration: “Accelerated decay,” Gee says. “The result of harsh environmental factors, coal burning, and sneaker factories”—and their marriage, Em’s career, and her happiness are similarly wasting away. Up to this point in her life, Em has played things safe despite a few brave moments, as when she tells herself she has her “own dragons to slay”—but for most of the novel, though, her moves against her demons are weak, and readers must wait patiently for the moment when she decides she’s finally up for the fight. The shift comes slowly in a disjointed narrative that jumps back and forth in time and around the globe, but Em does eventually realize that change is up to nobody but her. Maxfield calls Em’s problems those of “tagalong wife privilege,” but the novel isn’t just about that; there’s something here that’s more universal, which women in different circumstances are sure to find familiar: the notion of abandoning the care of one’s own health and happiness in the name of love of family and marriage. The book is littered with backstory, and not all of it feels necessary. However, Maxfield does manage to capture the complex push and pull of playing a supporting role in one’s own life.
An emotionally honest story about a struggle for balance.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-742142-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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