THE DAYS TO COME
Marcello glimpsed sidelong in a mirror. The women he loves, it seems, are shape-shifters, elusive, complex, sybil-like figures who refuse to sit still and allow themselves, in the metaphor Marcello borrows from Nabokov, to be butterflies whose beauty is celebrated by getting pinned to a specimen board. The vain, bewildered Marcello seems at first like a man out of time, trying to replicate 1950s manhood (or the swaggering machismo of canonical male writers of the time) in a world that can no longer sustain it—and that he knows can no longer sustain it. But gradually, as he gets more accustomed to his limitations as man and as artist, as he reflects on the ways men have tried to capture or subdue or simplify women in their portraits, he relaxes, starts to pay attention. And once he’s sufficiently chastened and selfconscious enough to give up on the ideal of master portraitist, the women emerge more sharply and in greater detail. A novel about the male gaze...and about what happens when its power has begun to dim.
Rosenstiel, Tom Ecco/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $27.99 | Nov. 23, 2021 978-0-06-289264-5 Political consultants Peter Rena and Randi Brooks return for another thrillercum–civics lesson following Oppo (2019). Having helped Wendy Upton clear her reputation and become vice president of the United States, Rena and Brooks find themselves in President-elect David Traynor’s inner circle. Traynor is a Silicon Valley technocrat with big plans for the country, and in laying them out he functions as an advocate for Rosenstiel’s own prescription for an American administration. This prescription is astute, but unfortunately it’s laid out so comprehensively that it detracts from any element of thrill in the plot. In Rosenstiel’s analysis, the key to saving the climate lies in energy storage—a better battery will make possible a large-scale shift to renewable energy sources. Traynor creates a secret battery-development initiative using private tech startups funded from national security sources; the effort is speculative at best, but the rewards seem to justify the political risk. Then Traynor dies, and Upton takes the helm. She’s concerned that news of the initiative will leak and expose her administration to legal and political hazards, and she engages Rena and Brooks to assess how practical and how secure the program is; foreign individuals have also invested in the startups and may be acting as agents of competing powers. Rena, meanwhile, is suffering an identity crisis brought on by the breakup of his longtime relationship, and, in a somewhat superfluous subplot, Steph Myers, a wannabe conspiracy theorist, stalks him. None of these plot elements is compelling or substantial enough to carry the narrative. Plenty of astute analysis and innovative proposals but not enough narrative energy.
LOVE, LISTS, & FANCY SHIPS
Ruiz, Sarah Grunder Berkley (336 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 23, 2021 978-0-593335-42-0 While trying to complete her bucket list of 30 things to do before she turns 30, a woman grapples with grief and a burgeoning romance. Jo Walker has been a yacht stewardess for 5 years, spending months at a time ferrying the superrich across the seas. While Jo loves her job and the crew, her desire to get out of her comfort zone leads her to start a 30-by-30 project, complete with a blog to document it all. What started as a fun pastime, however, has fallen by the wayside since her 11-year-old nephew, Samson—with whom she shared a birthday 26
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15 october 2021
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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