A girl, a city, an inhospitable society: Ferrante’s formula works again!
An overheard remark prompts an adolescent girl to uncover the truth about her relatives (and herself) in Ferrante’s precise dissection of one family’s life in Naples.
Upon hearing her father refer to her, disparagingly, as having the same face as a despised and estranged relative, 12-year-old Giovanna, previously a good student and affectionate daughter, embarks on an odyssey of detection and discovery through areas of Naples from which her educated and progressive parents have shielded her. Desperate to determine whether she, indeed, resembles the abhorred Aunt Vittoria, Giovanna seeks out her father’s sister and develops a fraught relationship with the troubled woman. The process of untangling generations of internecine deceit and rivalry—including the provenance of a peripatetic heirloom bracelet—leads Giovanna to truths about the conventional lies told by her parents and to decisions about how she wishes to conduct her own, not-yet-adult, life. (The bracelet appears to have mutable properties and serves as either charm or handcuff, just another thing to ask the enigmatic author about over coffee.) Ferrante revisits previously explored themes—violence against women, female friendships, the corrosive effects of class disparities—albeit in a more rarified sector of Naples (the privileged “upper” neighborhood of Rione Alto) than in her earlier Neapolitan Quartet. Giovanna’s nascent sexuality is more frankly explored than that of previous Ferrante protagonists, permitting the author to highlight two sides of teen sexuality: agency and abuse. Goldstein’s fluid translation once again allows readers into the head of a young woman recalling with precision and emotion a series of events which lead to a point of confession. Ferrante’s legion of devoted readers will be encouraged by another equivocal ending, permitting the hope of further exploration of Giovanna’s journey in future volumes.
A girl, a city, an inhospitable society: Ferrante’s formula works again!Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-591-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
© 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.
