Larger-than-life characters drive this charming, hilarious, and memorable debut.
In the dynamic partnership that is Hollywood icon and celebrity assistant, who needs whom more?
This debut novel, based loosely on the author’s own experiences as a celebrity assistant, quickly establishes normalcy as a fluid concept. Normal for Charlie, a news writer in LA, is defined by working the graveyard shift and regularly contemplating suicide. Open to any opportunity to hit reset on his life, he takes a lead from intolerable executive assistant Bruce, whom he met at a gay bar and now hate-follows on social media. Kathi Kannon, star of cult-favorite film Nova Quest, is looking for an assistant. Charlie soon finds himself far outside his comfort zone, buzzing the intercom of his childhood idol. His call is answered with a curt “HURRY!” and the gate opens to his new life. Kathi’s world is, in a word, chaos, and Charlie—now dubbed rather salaciously as Cockring—is tasked with establishing a routine. As in: “feed her, water her, medicate her.” Turns out, Charlie was not left with an Assistant Bible, the invaluable tool that helps new assistants navigate a life to which they could never relate. Deciphering Kathi is a 24-hour task (“KATHI: I urgently need teeth splinter barfs….ME: Toothpicks, you need toothpicks?...KATHI: Horble twat”), and their dynamic will be as amusing for the reader as it is all-consuming for Charlie. Duality is a key theme of this relationship, as Kathi not-so-subtly becomes a second mother figure to Charlie after helping him realize the absurd tragedy of his childhood (“[Your mom] died in a fucking church?!”). At the same time, entranced by Kathi's Hollywood shine, Charlie rationalizes the absurdity in her daily life in a way that leaves him blind to her shadows. Kathi and Charlie’s story is one of addiction—mostly to other people and what they can add to your life. Their story is also deeply human, relatable in the most unrelatable way. Bravo to Lane, who deftly navigates the complexity of inner and outer lives as well as the many facets of normal. Add this to the Assistant Bible: A famous person’s boredom is another person’s saving grace.
Larger-than-life characters drive this charming, hilarious, and memorable debut.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26649-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
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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