THE HOMEWRECKERS
Andrews, Mary Kay St. Martin’s (448 pp.) $26.09 | May 3, 2022 978-1-2502-7836-4
y o u n g a d u lt
A young Georgia widow flips a historic house and finds evidence of a long-missing woman while developing a growing attraction for a co-worker. Hattie Kavanaugh married her high school sweetheart and lost him to a motorcycle accident after just a few years of marriage. Almost seven years on, she’s still living in her unfinished bungalow renovation near Savannah, grieving her husband, Hank, and flipping houses with his dad, Tug; her best friend, Cassidy Pelletier; and Cass’ mother, Zenobia. After a disastrous flip where she loses all her savings on a gorgeous—but dilapidated—157-year-old home, Hattie decides to take an offer to star in a Home Place Television Network production with Cass that will bring in a steady paycheck as she works on her next flip and tries to earn back the money she’s lost. The catch—which she doesn’t know but her producer, Mo Lopez, does—is that the show she signed on for has changed in concept from a straight house-flipping show to a house-flip–meets–dating-show, where the goal is for the handsome designer, Trae Bartholomew, to seduce her over the course of the series. Hattie digs deep to fund the flip, pawning her engagement ring and taking a loan from her father, a wealthy ex-felon who has served time in prison for embezzlement. Author Andrews has packed a lot into this story: Not only is there drama from the reality show and Hattie’s growing attraction to a co-worker, but 17 years earlier beloved local schoolteacher Lanier Ragan went missing, and the story follows both the renovation of the long-abandoned beach home Hattie buys and the discovery of evidence in the cold case of the teacher’s disappearance. A fun story with twists and turns that will appeal to romantics and cold-case fans alike.
Alice’s brother, Bill, is at loose ends after leaving MeWantThat, the shopping app he founded; he takes a sudden interest in Buddhism, which is met with skepticism by his wife, Pitterpat, who “made an activity of wanting” but also seems to realize that the tony real estate she covets won’t fill the emptiness inside her. The lives of the four characters (and several more, who move in and out of the novel) are all thrown into disarray when Roxy becomes embroiled in a scandal that transfixes the internet, Pitterpat gets diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and Bill impulsively makes a sudden, drastic life change. Throughout the novel, the characters wrestle with their addictions to their smartphones and social media: “Something’s happened to my brain,” Alice laments. “I don’t know what it is. But I think it has to do with this phone I can’t stop looking at every thirty fucking seconds.” Bays was a co-creator of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, so it’s no surprise his novel is highly comic—sometimes darkly so. (The characters watch a reality show called Love on the Ugly Side, one episode of which forces the contestants to watch “deepfake videos of their parents having sex in order to win a couple’s massage.”) What is surprising is how beautifully written it is and
THE MUTUAL FRIEND
Bays, Carter Dutton (480 pp.) $27.00 | June 7, 2022 978-0-593-18676-3
Several New Yorkers struggle to put down their phones in this debut comic novel. There’s an abundance of characters in Bays’ novel, and almost none of them know what they want. There’s Alice, a 28-year-old nanny who thinks she wants to go to medical school but takes forever to register for the MCAT. There’s her new roommate, Roxy, a 34-year-old Manic Pixie flibbertigibbet with a City Hall job whose desires are even more amorphous: “Roxy wanted what she wanted to want, nothing more, nothing less.” |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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1 may 2022
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7
