A jolting but thoughtful drama.
In Jackson’s novel, a struggling artist, upon learning her estranged sister is missing, returns to her childhood home and uncovers long-buried secrets.
In 2019, 35-year-old Cate Finley has a toughness that’s led her friend Levi Saaga to nickname her “Tiger Cate.” She needs a wild cat’s strength because her life presents significant challenges. She lives in a 1978 camper truck, which she calls “Max,” on the streets of Los Angeles. She paints murals on the sides of buildings; it’s sometimes dangerous work that results in skimpy paychecks. Cate still grieves her parents who died in a plane crash, and she left the Arizona horse ranch of her childhood on bad terms with her 50-year-old sister, Margaret. Cate’s son was taken away by his wealthy father, a physically abusive man. The one bright spot is her friend Levi, an apparently unhoused IT technician working to bring his mom to L.A. from Samoa. When Cate receives mysterious texts about her sister’s disappearance, she journeys back home to Arizona, where the ranch her sister ran is now controlled by Estelle Parker, a stranger claiming to be a cousin. The newcomer has a mysterious hold over the ranch’s employees and reveals a plan to sell the land to developers. Jackson keeps excitement levels high right from the start; in the opening pages, Cate dangles from scaffolding 100 feet above the ground before the story flashes back. The steady drip of revelations about Margaret, Cate’s parents, Estelle, Levi, and others makes for enough material to power an entire soap opera season. However, Jackson effectively keeps the story from being melodramatic with fast pacing and well-developed characters. The author strategically spaces out surprises throughout the book and balances them with quieter scenes of interiority, such as Cate painting. The characters are mostly flawed but likable, and even the worst villains are given context for their actions.
A jolting but thoughtful drama.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2023
ISBN: 9798988298014
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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