This offbeat take on time-hopping stories begins slowly but finds momentum in memorable characterization.
Davis follows up Little by Little (2019) with the final installment in her Tower Room series, featuring two industrious tweens determined to complete a mission.
The Tower Room is a magical space in a house in Toronto that allows certain people to be transported back in time under the guidance of a man named Leo. In the previous book, an 11-year-old named Charlotte Lisa Hansen, Leo’s granddaughter, was one of those people. She and her pal, Henry Jacobs, journeyed back to 1939 to the childhood of a woman named Gwendolyn MacFarlane, and made sure that she didn’t come into possession of a brooch called the Tree of Life. In this work, the year is 1999 and although Charlotte and Henry are still young, Gwendolyn is a rather well-to-do, snobbish 71-year-old who’s led an unhappy, self-involved life. Gwendolyn accompanies Charlotte and Henry on a trip to London, although the elder woman doesn’t particularly like minding children (especially Charlotte) and isn’t fond of most people in general (although she has a fondness for Henry). As an example of her haughty ways, she purchases two first-class tickets for herself for the trip “thereby eliminating the possibility” of talking to a stranger. The trio are set to meet a woman named Sarah Nyman, who now runs a theater school for kids and who played a key role in Gwendolyn’s childhood; Sarah was also in a relationship with Gwendolyn’s brother, Charlie, a Royal Air Force pilot who died in World War II. The trip will be an opportunity for Gwendolyn to confront aspects of her past that she may not even realize are still bothering her. And, naturally, there will be plenty to keep Charlotte and Henry busy.
This combination of knowledgeable children and a snooty curmudgeon makes for some humorous interactions. As strange and serious as the set-up may be, the story features plenty of humor, as when Henry points out that his parents seem to “like the idea of having a child in the abstract,” or when Gwendolyn’s stuck-up nature is illustrated by details such as her holding her teacup “at a precarious angle while she viewed the birds, chipmunks, and late blooming dahlias with a sense of superiority.” The main plot, however, takes some time to develop; early pages are spent with Henry’s parents discussing with Gwendolyn and others whether Henry should make the trip to England at all; this doesn’t do much to ignite an interest in the journey to come, despite the lively banter. Nevertheless, the characters are distinct and likable, with turns of phrase that quickly gives readers a sense of each individual, as when young Charlotte explains how she doesn’t require much sleep, which “makes things difficult for the people around me, but they simply must learn how to cope.” Much of the book’s appeal lies in following Gwendolyn’s emotional journey and finding out what, if anything, she will learn about herself in the end.
This offbeat take on time-hopping stories begins slowly but finds momentum in memorable characterization.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781039192133
Page Count: 372
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
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