A scenic yet tepid tale.
After one of them is diagnosed with a terminal illness, friends and lovers reconnect as they take on a pilgrimage to Rome.
Three years ago, Zoe, an American cartoonist from San Francisco, and Martin, an English engineer from Sheffield, met and fell in love while walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela from France to Western Spain. Ultimately, Zoe couldn’t give up her life in America, and they parted as friends. Now, Zoe is back in France, about to take another journey with her college friend Camille, who has just found out she has multiple sclerosis. This time, they’ll be walking the Chemin d’Assise to Rome, where Camille hopes to see the pope. Thanks to some miscommunication, they're joined by Martin; his 20-year-old daughter, Sarah; and Bernhard, a college student who walked the Camino with them. Gilbert, Camille’s now not-so-ex-husband, is also along for the hike. With almost a thousand miles to go to Rome, there’s plenty of time for relationships to grow and wither while feelings long unspoken make their ways to the surface. In this follow-up to Two Steps Forward (2018), the husband-and-wife writing team of Simsion and Buist again divide the book into alternating chapters told from Zoe's and Martin’s points of view. Unfortunately, most of Zoe's and Martin’s character growth happened in the previous book, and characters with weightier journeys, such as Sarah, Camille, and Gilbert, are tragically overlooked. An emphasis, for better or for worse, is put on practicality when it comes to emotions, and that seems to sum up most of the writing: The bones of the story are there, but the feelings surrounding them seem to be stripped away. The descriptions of the towns and inns the characters stay in along the way are vivid, but the pilgrims themselves are drab.
A scenic yet tepid tale.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-922458-86-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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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