February 1, 2025
Two lovers must face uncomfortable truths when a tryst places them in the middle of catastrophe. Until a few years ago, Jenny Parrish was a "stay-at-home mom with two kids, frazzled, exhausted," doing nothing special with her life. Then, under the influence of a powerful new attraction, she "started to write, fitting it in--before the kids woke up and after they went to bed," and became a minor celebrity as the bestselling author of a YA supernatural romance series. Nick Holloway is, by his own admission, a "golden boy." A partner at a law firm whose antitrust cases make theNew York Times, Nick is also a doting father, married to a woman who appears to adore him, and blessed with a libido that remains unflagging even under the most dire of circumstances. The subject of Nick's libido is a central one because he's been having sex with Jenny regularly for the past six years, and the ghostly lover in her novels is modeled on him. Now, for the first time, Jenny and Nick have managed to arrange an entire night in each other's company, holed up on the 42nd floor of Manhattan's newest luxury hotel. Their plans are interrupted, though, when what at first seems to be a false alarm from the hotel's fire detection system turns out to be a real, and raging, conflagration. As the flames creep upward, Jenny and Nick find different reasons to delay their escape until the possibility is almost gone. Their night of passion becomes one of revelation as they are forced to investigate the truths they have spent the past six years concealing from each other and themselves. Told in slickly alternating perspectives, each chapter whizzes back and forth between Jenny--tender, insecure, prickly with superficial outrage at some of Nick's more louche moves--and Nick's vulnerable self-doubt, which he plasters over with a heavy shellac of lechery. While the looming threat of the fire keeps the book's tensions high, the almost slapstick reliance on sex as a narrative MacGuffin, used to force the characters into revelatory inner monologues, coupled with Jenny's baffling vacuity (she's a bestselling novelist who routinely can't remember the word "bulkhead") and Nick's compulsive horniness prevents the reader from developing an emotional attachment to either character that goes beyond an appreciation for their banter. A great premise--the locked-room romance!--fouled by flimsy characters.
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Starred review from February 1, 2025
Kennedy (Do This for Me, 2018) returns with another nuanced, thoughtful look at infidelity that takes place over one harrowing night. Lawyer Nick and novelist Jenny have been carrying on an affair for six years, but this is the first time they've planned to spend a whole night together in a new, upscale Manhattan hotel. Their intended night of torrid sex is interrupted by a smoke detector alarm: there's a fire on a floor far beneath theirs. The fire is allegedly small and guests are told to stay in their rooms until it's contained, but Jenny panics, fearing the fire is worse than they're being told. Her fears are not unfounded, and as the fire worsens, Jenny and Nick are forced to confront not just the peril they're in, but the complexity of their feelings for each other, their respective spouses, and the course their lives have taken. Readers may initially be baffled by the lack of quotation marks and any separation between shifts in perspective, but these choices ultimately serve to underscore the intimacy and mounting urgency of the situation. It's well-worth watching the layers of Jenny and Nick's emotional armor being peeled back as the tension between them and the danger mounts in Kennedy's increasingly gripping and emotional novel.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.