A poignant and relatable exploration of adjusting to motherhood.
Two newly married women embark on the journey of motherhood, struggling with how expectations from others, and from themselves, alter their lives and identities.
The book opens as the unnamed narrator reflects on how she has lost herself. In trying for years to meet everyone else’s needs, she has forgotten about what truly matters to her, and she resolves to take a new approach to finding happiness. Then the story introduces its other main character, “the princess,” who has just recently married “the prince.” As they begin what is supposed to be a fairytale life, not everything is as easy as they expected. The book alternates between the perspectives of the princess and the narrator, both women giving birth to a son and a daughter. The princess’s children are called simply “the heirs,” while the narrator’s are her boy and her girl, never receiving proper names. As the women learn to care for their children, they realize they can’t devote as much time to their professions as they’d hoped, and they must adjust either their parenting strategies or their career goals. The husbands are busy trying to earn enough to support their families, but the children are hard work, and arguments between the spouses become frequent. As both marriages spiral further away from their romantic beginnings, the question at the heart of the story is whether the expectations on women to be perfect mothers are simply too much. Writing in haunting, introspective prose, the author captures the essence of early motherhood, from the hazy months of sleep-deprivation to the angst many feel about juggling careers with children. By alternating first-person narration with the story of the princess, the author also highlights how the lives of others often look more idyllic from the outside. The book is partially a commentary on the lack of support women receive when they become mothers, but it’s also an examination of how lack of communication in marriage can lead to deep fissures. While this poetic tale feels more like an allegory than a plot-driven novel, light on setting and character details, the insight into modern parenting is sufficiently insightful that the book becomes compelling.
A poignant and relatable exploration of adjusting to motherhood.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9798992427646
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Zibby Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
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