A delightful love letter to great literature.
A bookstore owner discovers her shop has a unique and wonderous secret in Andersen’s novel.
Aspiring author Aurelia Lyndham has struggled with writer’s block since the deaths of her mother and Aunt Marigold, which occurred less than a year apart. To cope with these losses, she focuses on running On the Square Books, a bookshop she inherited from Marigold. The business has a specialized inventory—it only sells books written by authors born before 1900. It also holds an incredible surprise. After hearing voices coming from the shop late at night, Aurelia discovers that characters from the books on her Recommended Reads table have emerged from the pages to socialize. She befriends various figures from classic literature, including Count Vronsky from Anna Karenina and Elinor and Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility. Aurelia is soon living a double life, running the bookshop by day and spending time with the literary characters at night. When Count Vronsky laments his tragic and unsettled fate, Aurelia discovers the inspiration she needs to write again. Her project piques the interest of book editor Oliver Pearce; as Aurelia and Oliver work on editing her novel, their friendship and collaboration leads to a deeper attraction, and Aurelia begins to wonder if she will find a happy ending in her own life. Andersen’s debut romance is a charming tale of a writer finding inspiration and a chance at true love via the characters in her favorite classic novels. Aurelia is an amiable protagonist who’s trying to rebuild her life after two devastating losses; her relationship with Oliver Pearce is well developed and cleverly mirrors the story she develops for Count Vronsky. Andersen is a talented storyteller with a knack for vivid descriptions. In one scene, a literary character reaches for a book, “Only—his hand went right through it, turning into a white mist with what looked like black dots running across it…or were they letters?” The novel is an appealing blend of fantasy and romance, rooted in a love of classic novels.
A delightful love letter to great literature.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798998747700
Page Count: 355
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
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