If you're ready to abandon all political consciousness and get in the wayback machine, you'll exit smiling.
An archly comic love story with notes of farce and fable.
Meet Charlie Green, a very rich, White, Ivy League–bound 18-year-old with Holden Caulfield genes, about to fall in love with the most beautiful "light-eyed" female barmaid in Philadelphia. Set in 1987, Roberts' debut almost seems like it was written in 1987; from the title on out, the author is blithely unhampered by current ideas about privilege, sexism, ethnic stereotypes, and more. Charlie is the son of adorable Frenchman George Green, known as Jee-Jee, and Rose, his alcoholic wife, whose fairy-tale wealth comes from a barnful of old masters paintings. At first, the novel has YA overtones, as we meet Charlie working as the only skinny counselor at a camp for overweight middle schoolers. "It pain[s] [Charlie] that he [can’t] give himself…romantically" to the Very-Brown-Eyed-Counselor who has a crush on him; he is saving himself for his last night before college, during which he has elaborately planned to lose his virginity to his girlfriend. Despite following the advice of his successful older brother, John—"The shower you take before you lose your virginity is more important than the shower you take before your wedding....A new bar of Irish Spring. New razor. No cologne. Extra deodorant, but it has to be cheap. You should smell like a working man"—he'll end up sulking over pizza and headed for life-changing adventures. Every step of the way he consults John, who is, after all, a successful Wall Street "Haircut" with a Princeton degree and an amazing six-figure girlfriend named Shannon Chang. Informing Charlie that almost every pretty girl owns a futon, he explains, "They treat it like a flying carpet. They're obsessed. It's weird. They think it makes them seem more grounded, but also sexually aloft. Girls are really into their own paradoxes." Roberts' old-school, slightly surreal humor has a dash of Barthelme or Perelman.
If you're ready to abandon all political consciousness and get in the wayback machine, you'll exit smiling.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950994-27-4
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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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