A great premise—the locked-room romance!—fouled by flimsy characters.
Two lovers must face uncomfortable truths when a tryst places them in the middle of catastrophe.
Until a few years ago, Jenny Parrish was a “stay-at-home mom with two kids, frazzled, exhausted,” doing nothing special with her life. Then, under the influence of a powerful new attraction, she “started to write, fitting it in—before the kids woke up and after they went to bed,” and became a minor celebrity as the bestselling author of a YA supernatural romance series. Nick Holloway is, by his own admission, a “golden boy.” A partner at a law firm whose antitrust cases make the New York Times, Nick is also a doting father, married to a woman who appears to adore him, and blessed with a libido that remains unflagging even under the most dire of circumstances. The subject of Nick’s libido is a central one because he’s been having sex with Jenny regularly for the past six years, and the ghostly lover in her novels is modeled on him. Now, for the first time, Jenny and Nick have managed to arrange an entire night in each other’s company, holed up on the 42nd floor of Manhattan’s newest luxury hotel. Their plans are interrupted, though, when what at first seems to be a false alarm from the hotel’s fire detection system turns out to be a real, and raging, conflagration. As the flames creep upward, Jenny and Nick find different reasons to delay their escape until the possibility is almost gone. Their night of passion becomes one of revelation as they are forced to investigate the truths they have spent the past six years concealing from each other and themselves. Told in slickly alternating perspectives, each chapter whizzes back and forth between Jenny—tender, insecure, prickly with superficial outrage at some of Nick’s more louche moves—and Nick’s vulnerable self-doubt, which he plasters over with a heavy shellac of lechery. While the looming threat of the fire keeps the book’s tensions high, the almost slapstick reliance on sex as a narrative MacGuffin, used to force the characters into revelatory inner monologues, coupled with Jenny’s baffling vacuity (she’s a bestselling novelist who routinely can’t remember the word “bulkhead”) and Nick’s compulsive horniness prevents the reader from developing an emotional attachment to either character that goes beyond an appreciation for their banter.
A great premise—the locked-room romance!—fouled by flimsy characters.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800836
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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