An entertaining combination of sit-com and melodrama.
Butterfield’s sardonic novel chronicles the 40-year friendship of three women.
In 1985, Diane Daly, Nikki Barone, and Orla Nevins are in Indiana, playing the roles of Tevye’s daughters in the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Being cast in the summer stock production is a major coup for the struggling actresses, and during the run of the show, despite a few jealousies here and there, they form a tight bond. Forty years later, Diane has just returned to her Santa Monica home after a three-day evacuation due to the wildfire in her area. She is lucky—the fire did not quite reach her over-mortgaged property, though everything is covered in ash. She has been considering suicide, but now that she and her house have survived the fire, she decides the idea of killing herself is absurd (“How selfish to take oneself out of the picture when the picture had changed so dramatically”). She calls to check in with Nikki, who is living in Colorado and wondering why she ever agreed to leave New York. As they talk, they realize neither of them has heard from Orla, although Diane has tried to contact her. Concerned, Diane heads off to New York to find her, with Nikki joining her a couple of days later. Butterfield’s narrative toggles back and forth between the past and present. In alternating chapters, she fills in the protagonists’ backstories and experiences (individually and together) through the decades. Set against the backdrop of civil protests, the AIDS epidemic, the World Trade Center attack, and the Covid-19 pandemic, the story is packed with entertainment-world tidbits and references, cultural signifiers, and the music of a country in constant, rapid change. Diane, Nikki, and the quirky, dramatically romantic Orla differ in temperament and lifestyle choices, each following diverging paths as they do battle with life’s personal and professional slings and arrows, yet always managing to overcome periods of separation and even betrayal to reconnect with one another. Butterfield’s acerbic prose provides ample humor and social commentary, adding a joyful ambiance to a narrative occasionally heavy with emotional baggage and tragedy.
An entertaining combination of sit-com and melodrama.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9798999291103
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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