A nuanced and poignant coming-of-age historical novel.
A young Eastern European immigrant struggles with issues of identity, love, and loss in Petrovsky’s novel.
In the Bolshevik town of Komenska in Byelorussia, Lev is a 17-year-old Jewish boy who’s forced to flee the aftermath of a pogrom. Leaving behind a peaceful past and his hopes for a stable future, he seeks refuge with an eclectic group of Roma travelers who call themselves the Aluşta Traveling Circus & Sideshow of Amazing Freaks. Petrovsky showcases the diversity of this troupe of persecuted people, which, in addition to its Roma founders, includes a Hindu snake charmer and a Middle Eastern performer known as the Amazing Exploding Man. Lev’s horizons expand during wild nights with bewitching sex workers, conversations on freedom with a performer who sets himself on fire, and encounters with bigoted law enforcement. Unfortunate hostilities and unforeseen friendships lead him to board a ship traveling from Finland to New York City, where he works in a brothel on the Lower East Side and navigates conflicting local Jewish communities; later, he makes a move to the West. Throughout his journey, Lev searches for love, tries to hold onto the values of his childhood, and comes to terms with the traumas of his past. This work balances distanced observations about the world with the intense emotions of the immigrant experience. Petrovsky’s prose is succinct and simple, reflecting the perspective of a young man thrown headlong into the perilous task of growing up. Lev’s observations are carefully crafted to evoke universal themes; for example, he notes, upon arriving in New York, that “America is no better than any place else.…As an idea, it is genius, a towering light so bright that it blocks all ugliness and intolerance.” The author adds depth to the novel’s historical context by showing the complex dynamics among different ethnic groups, including conflicts between Southern and Eastern European Jews in New York and, much later, difficulties between Latine and Native American people in Arizona.
A nuanced and poignant coming-of-age historical novel.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64663-807-9
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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