An involving tale that balances struggle, love, and hope.
The first novel in McBride’s series explores second chances during Covid-19.
Katie Young, an IT systems director who’s nearly 50, feels adrift as a new empty nester in her small town near Occoquan, Virginia. It’s the early 2020s, and Covid, quarantines, office shutdowns, and furloughs are everywhere. Her daughter, Belle, heads to college, and Katie lands a new job in Miami. A lifelong boater, she meets James Conway “JC” Bland III at a Miami marina; a whirlwind romance leads to a quick marriage proposal. Despite nagging doubts, she says yes. JC’s yacht becomes a metaphor for their damaged marriage. (“She saw the imperfections first. The crazing in the porthole glass, faded curtains, a water stain in the ceiling.”) The newlyweds sail to Key West, snorkel at Dry Tortugas National Park, and party with new friends and fellow boaters, including Rhiannon and her husband, Corde. McBride ably limns the women as they develop their friendship, sharing confidences and “quarantinis” at bonfires with the other “Beach Bonfire Babes.” Life shifts abruptly, however, when Katie’s mother contracts Covid and dies. Katie moves into Bonnie Brae, her childhood Virginia home, to settle the estate. We learn more about Bonnie Brae, a “red-roofed Cape Cod” that abuts the Potomac River (“The shoreline was right on a protected bay across from a national wildlife refuge”). She finds strength to assess her new marriage and to plan her future with help from friends and Deke, who works for the Potomac Science Center and shares many common interests with Katie. McBride adeptly intertwines the lives of Katie and Rhiannon, and themes of love, family, loss, and betrayal emerge. The author sets a vivid scene (“The sun was just rising in the east, and a white layer of fog rose from the surface of the water as if the river was lifting its bedtime blanket”), and her storytelling consistently engages.
An involving tale that balances struggle, love, and hope.Pub Date: April 12, 2024
ISBN: 9798990295803
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Make Waves Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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