An ultrabusy plot overwhelms elegant writing.
Two pairs of sisters share a similar dynamic—and a tragically intertwined fate.
After Lyon made her debut with a well-received historical novel about Aristotle (The Golden Mean, 2010) and followed it with a sequel (The Sweet Girl, 2013), her third adult novel is a complete departure, set largely in present-day Vancouver. Sara is a sophisticated intellectual who shops for designer clothes and expensive perfume in Paris; she considers her hometown a bit of a backwater. But after her mother’s death, Sara’s travels are curtailed, as the care of her developmentally disabled younger sister, Mattie, is now in her hands. Though she’s not paying close enough attention to prevent the beautiful Mattie from getting married to their late mother’s handyman, as soon as she finds out about the marriage, she swings into action to have it annulled. In a parallel storyline, Saskia and Jenny are a pair of twins who are as different as Sara and Mattie. Saskia is the smart one, Jenny the wild one. And like Sara's, Saskia’s prospects will ultimately be constrained by her sisterly responsibilities. Following two similar stories with similarly named characters can be a challenge, and between that and the amount of contrivance and tragedy required to bring the storylines together, Lyon’s novel bogs down. The most enjoyable aspects of the book have little to do with the plot and are mostly Sara's—scenes in dress shops and perfume stores, her thoughts about the plots of a fictional memoir and a fictional TV show, her fantasy of an imaginary alternate life. “In her mind she lives alone, somewhere old and elegantly seedy: Lisbon, Venice, or some old Caribbean port where the sun dawns pinkly and the trade winds cool the veranda in the evening…she drinks at dusk and writes on a vintage pink typewriter before that….” Instead, she's stuck in this B-movie melodrama.
An ultrabusy plot overwhelms elegant writing.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31800-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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