A fictional family tale that flows like a biography narrated with energy and optimism.
In this novel, a rebellious teen conducts soul-searching with the help of her great-grandmother’s diary.
Seventeen-year-old Delia Elliot of Rochester, New York, has ended her junior year of high school with her social life in shambles. After Greg Ashworth, her ex-boyfriend, shared private photographs of her with their classmates, Delia began a run of delinquent behavior. Now she’s been fired from her restaurant job and her mom, Heather, has decided to make her clean the attic of their dilapidated family home. In the midst of this task, Delia finds the diary of her great-grandmother Didi Diamond, dating from 1932. The teen reads about life during the Depression and Didi’s courtship with a young man called Paul. Delia is immediately stirred by the mystery of Paul’s presence since her great-grandfather’s name was Ron. Meanwhile, Heather feels invisible and craves a midlife boost in both her romantic situation and career. It doesn’t help that her ex-husband, Johnston, is happily remarried. She turns to Brian Napier, an occasional fling with whom she’s afraid to get too serious, for extra courage. Seeing progress with the attic, Heather loosens Delia’s house arrest. The teen begins falling for her neighbor Jake Freimuth, who’s nothing like the abusive Greg. As the rift between Delia and Heather starts to heal, with help from Didi’s diary, the pair feel ready to face anything. Barker knows this is the perfect moment to upend her characters’ lives. For the opening two-thirds of the dynamic story, chapters narrated by Delia and Heather alternate, with portions of Didi’s diary included. Events proceed loosely, and those of greatest import are interior to the mother’s and daughter’s lives. Heather decides to take on the challenge of becoming a real estate agent, for example. When Delia learns that her mother had a troubled childhood and spent time in foster homes, she realizes that Heather is “separate and distinct from me” and “lived an entire life before I came along.” When tragedy strikes toward the engaging novel’s end, the author toys with readers’ expectations since real life sometimes doesn’t provide closure. Ultimately, the tender finale will comfort audiences.
A fictional family tale that flows like a biography narrated with energy and optimism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73535-811-6
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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