Deeply emotional and satisfying.
A story of love, drugs, and hope.
In Anastasia, Florida, Olney Kartheizer had been a doting father to his son, Cully, and a devoted husband to Kat, who eventually leaves him. The lad was a star athlete who could pitch with either hand and write in Spanish with one hand while writing in English with the other. One day, he tells Olney he’s quitting sports because “fun will only get you so far.” Cully has some minor but painful accidents that lead to his use of OxyContin—or does the Oxy lead to the accidents? We never know, but the addictive poison wedges itself between father and son. Cully keeps asking his dad for money for one thing or another to “turn his life around,” and Olney is increasingly reluctant to give it. Cully tells his father he doesn’t need his approval and is “uncomfortable with constant parental proximity, preferring, himself, the bliss of distance.” Cully says he wishes his dad would treat him like a human being who has feelings, but Olney seems to be doing his best. Then Cully disappears, Olney looks for him and finally finds him—but not for long. The young man is on a self-destructive path, even getting fired from jobs such as sign twirling. His sometime girlfriend aptly calls him an “oxy moron,” one of the many examples of clever wordplay that help lighten the story. Olney, who doesn’t believe in God but likes to watch religious programs on TV, by chance meets Mireille Tighe, who is sweet, funny, and dying. Her throat is constricting from dysphagia, and soon she’ll be unable to swallow. “I intend to get to know you,” he tells her. “Better hurry up,” she replies. Readers will feel worse for this lovely woman than she does for herself, adding a layer of emotion atop the tale of filial loss. Olney could be any single father, any ordinary man who loves his child. But he spends a lot of time daydreaming about the past because that’s where he left his son. Meanwhile, does Olney love Cully only for who he was and not for who he is? Or is the love unconditional, as it may seem to the reader? Cully keeps leaving without a trace, and Olney keeps looking. And hoping.
Deeply emotional and satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781324035732
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
