A smart, funny, and sneakily terrifying version of the way we live now. (Do not read without working air conditioning.)
In the throes of a sanity-destroying summer, a Toronto woman explores a dangerous new hobby.
It’s not just hot, it’s an “end-of-days climate that increasingly resembled an Old Testament Hell.” In fact, thinks Beatrice Billings, “It could rain frogs now and humanity would take it in stride….Oh, it’s always rained frogs....She knew our Saviour had thrown in the towel and gone back to His golf game, and knew that mankind deserved to be punished. Certainly Bea deserved it.” Why does Bea, a 49-year-old Toronto art dealer with a son in college and a shaky marriage, think she deserves punishment? It begins on just another day she’s stuck in her empty gallery feeling lonely, bored, stressed out, and claustrophobic. She Googles “escape.” One video later, she’s sending away for a lock-picking kit. Not long after, she joins a lock-picking club; turns out, she’s very good at it. Next thing she knows, she's trailing a woman who’s just paid cash for a $1,500 dress. She returns to the woman’s home the next day, gets in fairly easily, and leaves with a rich store of knowledge about the lives of this woman and her husband—and also the dress. It doesn’t stop there for Bea, though after the first time, stealing isn’t part of the routine. She does tend to leave marks of her uninvited visits, at one house typing a Descartes joke into a crappy philosophy manuscript and, at another, phoning in a tip to a suicide hotline. Gillmor does an impressive job of keeping Bea not just sympathetic but even normal-seeming as this outlandish summer progresses. She does all she can for her mother, who’s in memory care; she’s patient with her annoying sister, who has lots of opinions while not contributing at all; she misses her son, whose presence in her life has been reduced to infrequent texts, not to mention her husband, who’s drifted as far from her as she has from him. As for breaking and entering? The genius of this book is to capture the exact way a familiar world of aging parents and divorcing friends and nice charcuterie platters could go right around the bend. Oh, you know, it’s always rained frogs.
A smart, funny, and sneakily terrifying version of the way we live now. (Do not read without working air conditioning.)Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781771965231
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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