One thing's for sure: magic doesn't make dating and love any easier. But there are old secrets and looming threats that could snatch away their happily ever after, again. When old feelings make a reappearance-along with Violet's magic-they both realize there's nothing fake about their feelings. But when the two of them are forced by arcane Supernatural Laws to find mates, Violet and Lincoln agree to fake-date their way to a fake-mating in order to conjure themselves some time. Magic-less witch Violet Maxwell wants nothing to do with alpha wolf shifter Lincoln Thorne-the man who broke her fragile, teenage heart. A fake relationship between a magic-less witch and a wolf shifter turns to more in the start of a bewitching new paranormal rom-com series.
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On Swift Horses, then, is a story about secrets and lies, about the image we present to the world and the reality beneath. While the men talk unaware, Muriel hugs their tips tight, then uses them to win on the racetrack, building up a fund that she lies about to her stolid husband Lee, claiming instead that she has sold the house in Kansas to help them set up on their own. These men pass the time gossiping about which horse is a sure thing and which will fail, speaking openly because “they believe the lounge owner to be simple – which is true – and Muriel, their waitress these long mornings, to be a woman and therefore incapable of both memory and complex reasoning… They could not know from her wide shoulders and square waist and rural modesty that she had taken the bus from Kansas on her own, that she could play cards and drive a car, or that she’d left behind a house she owned outright to come here.” On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl (Photo: 4th Estate) Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes, and it’s hard to imagine Conversations With Friends appearing without Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Tetralogy” and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series as immediate antecedents. None of their struggles are out of the ordinary. They aren’t transgressive like Ellis’s pretty monsters. Frances and her friends, at age 21, are a little too old to be precocious in the manner of a Salinger character, nor are any of them desperate cases like Seymour Glass. Salinger, but those signals indicate little more than that you’re opening a novel about young people written by a young person. The novel’s blurbs and marketing materials invite comparisons to Bret Easton Ellis and J. D. They watch Greta Gerwig movies, and like Gerwig’s most famous character, the narrator is named Frances. The narrator and her friends are fans of Twitter poet laureate Patricia Lockwood. The first novel by the 26-year-old Irish writer Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends, wears its influences on its sleeve. |