This is an entertaining and ultimately sweet story, but it’s best if you don’t think about it too hard.
A college student hunts for a lost Brontë artifact in this debut novel with academic overtones.
Samantha Whipple, the last of the Brontës, has at last come into her inheritance. Her beloved father, Tristan, was descended from a cousin of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne’s. Tristan died in a fire when Samantha was 15; a year before his death he told Sam she would someday inherit “The Warnings of Experience.” Is it a lost Brontë manuscript? A painting? A philosophy? A joke? Now a prickly first-year student at Oxford, Sam meets a banker to receive her legacy, but the shoebox she’s given contains nothing but a bookmark, the first clue in a treasure hunt. The quest takes her on a gentle jaunt through the major Brontë novels, highlights of critical theory, and Yorkshire in a storm. It makes for pleasant enough reading—Lowell has an agreeably sarcastic style and a way with similes—but poor estate planning. If you’re bothering to give a banker a shoebox, why not put the MacGuffin itself inside? Hiding the object out in the world makes no legal or practical sense. None of the usual explanations for fictional treasure hunts apply: it’s not as if rival heirs or supernatural forces are racing to get the thing first, and when Sam does eventually find it, she has no legal evidence that it belongs to her (not that Lowell seems to notice). Sam explains her father’s puzzling behavior by appealing to pedagogy: “He was trying to teach me the right way to read.” Also trying to teach her the right way to read is her professor, the handsome, brooding James Timothy Orville III, who insults her in private tutoring sessions; readers familiar with Jane Eyre will quickly see where that relationship is heading. Refreshingly, though, the novel draws its references most frequently from the work of the youngest, least interesting, and therefore least overexposed Brontë sister, Anne.
This is an entertaining and ultimately sweet story, but it’s best if you don’t think about it too hard.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2421-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
