Mackler knows how to shape scenes and characters but offers an oddly dated, privileged version of feminism lite.
Three divorced mothers in Manhattan join forces to create an app “to right marital inequalities” in this breezy look at gender imbalance.
Independently wealthy business school dropout Madeline Wallace, who has been happily divorced since her ex-husband transferred to London shortly after their daughter was born 14 years ago, borders on obsessive in how much she loves single motherhood. Lauren Zuckerman loves her 12-year-old twin daughters, too, but having recently gotten divorced after learning her ex-husband was having sex with prostitutes, she now regrets that she gave up a high-powered tech career to freelance and carry more of the parenting load. Literacy teacher Sophie Smart, who doesn't talk much about her bisexuality, struggles to support her sons, 12 and 7, with minimal help from her ex-husband, who has married and had a baby with a successful lawyer Sophie can't help both envying and liking. During a dinner celebrating Lauren’s divorce, Madeline half-seriously suggests that Lauren should develop an app to help women monetize the chores and, more importantly, the “mental load” of being a wife. Lauren takes Madeline’s idea and runs with it. The viewpoints shift among the three as the app develops, grows, and suddenly catches fire. Lauren handles the tech, Madeline the finance, and Sophie client relations. What starts as a socially conscious novel about the plight of women becomes an increasingly lightweight romp. Although “mental load” remains the main reference point throughout the book, the emphasis shifts to romance (plus sex) and relatively minor, ultimately solvable child-rearing crises, what Madeline acknowledges are “first-world problems.” There is surprisingly little social texture; these likable-enough women live in a world without racial tension or political anxiety. Although Mackler’s protagonists are around 40 and would have been barely 20 at the turn of the 21st century, they could easily populate an updated Sex and the City.
Mackler knows how to shape scenes and characters but offers an oddly dated, privileged version of feminism lite.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-9821-5879-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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