A nostalgia-filled, often engaging small-town story of a girl who overcomes adversity with wit.
In the third installment of the Happy Valley Chronicles, second grader Celia Canterberry faces the seemingly impossible task of making new friends while dealing with human and imaginary enemies.
Seven-year-old Celia is distraught when her best friend, Archibald Quigley, abandons her for Eugenia Whitford—the niece of Enid Whitford, her grandmother’s employer whom Celia calls her “number one nemesis.” Celia’s teacher, Miss Dobbs, shamelessly favors Eugenia, hoping to win the heart of the youngster’s recently widowed father. Celia turns to her neighbor Old Lady Griggs for advice on how to make friends. Griggs is invested in helping Celia connect with others, drawing on tips from Dale Carnegie’s self-help classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. However, most of these strategies—sometimes due to Celia’s mistaken interpretations—don’t quite turn out as they’d hoped. Celia has impatience beyond her years that effectively furnishes the story with a tone of comedic grumpiness; for example, when Miss Dobbs has the class celebrate a Halloween “Spooktacular,” featuring presentations on notable Happy Valleyans, the girl is utterly annoyed: “As if a seven-year-old could scrounge up a useful and brand-new nugget of information. I mean, I could, but not the rest of these numbskulls.” Nan, her grandmother, instills in her a love for literature; they have a book club in which they read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, from which excerpts are quoted. Indeed, there are countless references to 19th- and 20th-century European and American literature and popular culture, which some readers will find delightful. Celia’s boundless imagination produces her “storybook” friends with whom she either interacts or whom she embodies during make-believe play. Readers may want to brush up on Moby-Dick, Jane Eyre, and The Scarlet Pimpernel before reading to avoid missing out on the nuances that these tales provide to this story. Overall, some will find this work to be reminiscent of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, although it’s aimed at an adult readership. Froese’s simple black-and-white line drawings depict various people and events in the text.
A nostalgia-filled, often engaging small-town story of a girl who overcomes adversity with wit.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Black Crow Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2022
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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