Bechdel is incisive, tender, and funny—often at the same time.
The author of Are You My Mother? (2012) and Fun Home (2006) offers something that’s not quite a memoir and thoroughly wonderful.
We meet our protagonist, Alison Bechdel, when she’s been shocked from sleep by a shotgun blast. It’s her partner, Holly, trying to scare a bear away from the compost pile on their Vermont pygmy goat sanctuary. In addition to sharing a name, this character has a lot in common with her creator. Both are in middle age. Both made their names with a comic strip about lesbians. Both have written a much-lauded memoir in graphic-novel form. And both have seen their autobiographies refashioned by other artists. Bechdel the author could have written another story from her own point of view but, in creating an avatar, she gives herself some room to mess around, and the results are delightful. Alison the character is supposed to be finishing her next book, but she finds herself endlessly distracted. There’s her sister, who wants Alison to edit her manuscript. There’s a trio of old friends who have turned into a throuple. There’s the fact that Holly’s woodchopping videos and tool reviews are turning her into an Instagram influencer. And there’s the way Alison is trying to escape finishing her book by selling a reality show that’s kind of like Queer Eye except that instead of making people look better she’ll help them live more ethically within capitalism. As Bechdel lets the lives of her characters unfold, her words and pictures become the reality show. Alison and her friends are beautiful and ridiculous and ridiculously beautiful, and Bechdel is such a master of her craft that it might take a little while to appreciate what she does here.
Bechdel is incisive, tender, and funny—often at the same time.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780063278929
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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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
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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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