A solid historical novel that explores how love, hate, and prejudice can last for decades.
A migrant worker and a rancher's daughter form a lasting connection in this historical novel.
Webster, the author of Soul of Toledo (2016), presents a narrative that bounces between the late 1960s, the 1990s, and beyond, showing the lasting impact that people can have on each other’s lives. Mexican Carlos Montoya, who regularly travels between his home country and the United States as a migrant worker, goes to work in the fields of the Booker family’s ranch in California in 1967. He catches the eye of the owner’s wife, Amy Booker, who hires him to pose for her provocative drawings, which she uses to irritate her husband; however, Carlos ends up sleeping with Amy’s 20-ish daughter, Julie. Although he loves his wife, Isabel, back in Mexico, Carlos also begins an emotional and eventually sexual affair with a local woman, María. Carlos becomes the victim of police brutality—with details revealed over the course of the book—and returns to Mexico, where he wants to forget about his California years. In 1994, as debate rages over Proposition 187, which aims to deny state services to the undocumented, Lilia Gomez, who works for Julie, goes to visit Carlos in Michoacán. Carlos, now a widower, reluctantly tells her the story of his time with Julie; however, he and Lilia later fall for each other. Meanwhile, Benito Ortega, a young San Francisco activist, fights for immigrant rights while discovering his own connection to Carlos, and Julie resolves her own loose ends. Despite the sprawling and occasionally melodramatic plot, this novel is highly readable and easy to follow as the narrative and characters move between different eras and locales. Throughout, Carlos is a challenging protagonist, and his attempts to justify his infidelity are particularly infuriating, but Webster depicts his complexities with empathy. The author’s depictions of racism and brutality straddle the line between evocative and cartoonish (“Don’t you know that ranchers conspire against their workers?” Julie says. “María’s overseer would beat you for fun, then hand you to my father”). Overall, though, they generally help to present a vivid portrait of the challenges that Carlos faces throughout the story.
A solid historical novel that explores how love, hate, and prejudice can last for decades.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9970320-1-7
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
