A well-crafted and enchanting historical love story.
After losing her first great love to illness, a 17th-century Englishwoman falls for a forbidden man.
Cecilia couldn’t believe her good luck when she married William Thorowgood, the boy she’d always loved. Unfortunately, soon after the wedding, William falls victim to the plague and succumbs to a quick death. Following this loss, Cecilia spirals into a deep depression. Her sister, Margaret, takes her in, hoping to nurse her back to health. When days turn to weeks with no improvement, Margaret’s power-hungry husband, Robert Eden, declares Cecilia must take a new husband or remove herself from their home by the end of summer. Desperate to save Cecilia from an uncertain future, Margaret seeks help from David Mendes, a Jewish doctor from Portugal with a reputation for fixing incurable ailments, including melancholy. Cecilia is initially taken aback by David’s unfamiliar customs, but she soon begins to appreciate his quiet manner and thoughtful care. Before long, the pair develop a genuine friendship, and David’s visits help Cecilia improve—so much so that she begins sneaking out of Margaret’s home to explore London. These outings lead to a chance meeting with David, which ignites a new relationship between them. It’s clear they’re developing deeper feelings for each other, but given their vastly different backgrounds, their love is an impossibility. With rich prose and a plethora of delightful period details, shifting between Cecilia’s and David’s first-person perspectives, the story deftly explores their feelings of unlikely connection, as well as the isolation and hopelessness that can accompany loss of a loved one. Despite the sorrow burdening both main characters, the plot moves forward at an engaging clip, and the author manages to include sprinkles of levity at just the right pace to prevent the book from feeling oppressively bleak. While the writing often feels too modern, with characters acting in a manner too familiar or uttering surprisingly modern phrases, the story is sufficiently engaging to render the anachronisms forgivable.
A well-crafted and enchanting historical love story.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780593597873
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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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