An epic multigenerational love story sweeping across coastal Italy, Southern France, and Scotland.
In the Italian coastal town of Viareggio, Matelda Cabrelli Roffo is at the last stage of her life, but the matriarch still has decades' worth of family stories to share.
On the eve of her 81st birthday, Matelda offers her 25-year-old granddaughter Anina the contents of her jewelry case, a family tradition for brides-to-be. Of course, Anina selects the one item Matelda isn't ready to part with: a jewel-encrusted watch with a curiously upside-down facade. Matelda's attachment to the treasure—a rare sentiment in the Cabrelli family of jewelers—leads to questions about its origins and the unfolding of a family timeline Anina's never heard. In chapters alternating between the present and the nine decades leading up to Matelda's demurring, the Cabrelli family history is deftly illustrated through a long chain of strong women. At just 11 years old, Matelda's mother, Domenica Cabrelli, witnesses her best friend, Silvio, banished from Viareggio for being a fatherless troublemaker. Years later, Domenica, now a nurse, is exiled herself when the Catholic Church learns she's offered family planning advice to a young mother in distress. She lands in a convent in Scotland, where she continues nursing and plans to join the nunnery. Conveniently, love interrupts, and Domenica's marriage to a Scottish naval captain derails her plans, as does Italy's involvement in the war. With young Matelda in tow, Domenica longs for her hometown of Viareggio, a seaside paradise elderly Matelda cherishes until her last breath. Upon learning about the Cabrelli family struggles, sacrifices, and persistence, Anina changes, reconsidering the meaning of strength, family, and the types of love worth sacrificing for. Trigiani's adept character portrayals, deliciously described settings, and carefully considered details build momentum and intrigue from beginning to end.
An epic multigenerational love story sweeping across coastal Italy, Southern France, and Scotland.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18332-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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