Warm, hopeful, often charming. The Ramans are an idiosyncratic oasis in the world of literary unhappy families.
The Ramans were your typical Indian American family. Dad's a computer guy at Central Texas State University, Mom made sure the house was immaculate, the family well fed. Their son is an Ivy League lawyer in New York, their daughter a medieval history professor in Austin. But then, a year ago, Lata very untypically left her husband of 30-odd years, and now the ripples are starting to look more like a tsunami.
Meet Suresh. He took early retirement last year and now rattles around the family home in Clayborn. With Lata gone, he lives off frozen burritos and omelets. Taking care of the yard was another Lata job, one he handles more successfully, finding he likes getting his hands dirty. But his real pastime is dating. He Googles “Indian internet dating” one day and can’t stop searching. When he meets Mallika, he thinks he may have found his first second date. Across town, Lata’s living in a condo, working at the university’s music library, and faring better. She’s got a new friend, Deanna, the pierced and tattooed Ph.D. student she works with, and even a love interest, Len Greenberg, a jazz professor who brings her CDs. Now, at 57, Lata’s about to go on her very first first date. Daughter Priya is 35 and single, which in Raman world is not ideal, but worse: She’s seeing a married man, and she smokes. Even No. 1 son Nikesh is showing some cracks in his picture-perfect life: Glossy high-powered “wife” Denise refuses to celebrate their son’s first birthday with Nikesh’s parents unless he comes clean that they are actually not married. Varadarajan’s novel gives all four full voice to tell their stories. The parents’ come with affectionate Indianisms (when Deanna tells Lata about her own family troubles, Lata “[makes] a mental note to bring her a large Tupperware of lemon rice”); the kids’ with sharp takes on same (Priya explains that resenting an Indian mother’s love of a son was “like resenting the orbit of the moon”). Varadarajan has written her characters with intelligence and compassion, imbuing them with complexity; each narrative mirrors, refracts, refutes, and informs the others in what’s ultimately a tender exploration of family patterns, choices, regrets, and the possibility for change.
Warm, hopeful, often charming. The Ramans are an idiosyncratic oasis in the world of literary unhappy families.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9780593498026
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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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