An uninspired snapshot of the country’s current moment.
In Duffy’s sequel to Stockboy (2013), Phillip Doherty works at a novelty store again and feels torn between the East and West coasts—and between two different women.
As this novel opens, Phillip is despondent. His second book was a critical success but a commercial failure and he and his fiancee, Melissa, are having relationship problems, in part, due to financial strain. She works tenaciously at her job, but Phillip struggles to find a position. He eventually resigns himself to working, again, as a stockboy at Milton’s World of Fun—this time in San Diego instead of New York. As the pressures of everyday life build, Phillip finds himself looking at online-dating websites and becomes enamored with a teacher named LeAnn Kennedy. Melissa and Phillip soon agree to separate, and Phillip then decides to drive to New York to start his life over despite Californian LeAnn’s romantic overtures. Almost as soon as Phillip arrives, an unnamed virus strikes the country, causing closures and layoffs in the city and elsewhere. Lonely Phillip finds his heart pulled back to San Diego by both Melissa and LeAnn. Duffy traverses a lot of ground in this novel. By effectively setting the action duringthe current Covid-19 pandemic, Duffy offers intriguing insights into the plight of workers deemed essential or nonessential as well as the measures businesses take as they struggle to stay afloat. However, the prose feels flabby and polemic. Characters discuss how the country has become a “stockboy nation” because, as Phillip says, “We’re a bunch of people peddling items other people created to make money to survive.” The repetition cements Duffy’s point but does nothing to develop the argument further. The dialogue is often stilted and unnecessarily expository, and although Duffy provides glimpses of Melissa’s and LeAnn’s inner lives, the focus largely remains on Phillip, who’s often passive and indecisive. When Phillip receives a visit in the latter part of the novel, it’s a pleasant surprise, but it doesn’t affect him very much as a character.
An uninspired snapshot of the country’s current moment.Pub Date: June 11, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-65-007277-5
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2020
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
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
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