The redemption of a historical figure whose life ended in political disgrace.
An epic historical novel of communist China, illuminated through the life of an extraordinary real-life woman.
More than 700 pages maintain a brisk pace, beginning with the introduction of two young women whose lives will remain connected. One is the protagonist, Sun Yomei. Her classmate, rival, and eventual adversary is Jiang Ching, who warns the younger woman to stay away from a teacher in whom both have some romantic interest. Both are acting students, but the 24-year-old Ching is already more experienced and better established than the 17-year-old Yomei, whom she calls “my little sister.” The conniving Ching uses her sexual allure to advance her career and position, ultimately marrying Chairman Mao. The younger woman also rises to prominence, as a pioneering theatrical director. But Yomei remains an innocent, not really grasping that every man she meets seems to fall in love with her (in this novel at least) and why this generates resentment among so many women. She also believes that she can somehow remain free from political entanglement while devoting her life to the theater, an impossibility during the Cultural Revolution. Among the other complications are her adoption into the family of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, her theatrical training in Moscow, and her brutal encounter with the rapacious Mao. She embarks on a problematic marriage, one that might have made more sense to her in real life than it does in this book. Like its title, the novel can seem overstuffed, filled with incidents and characters that are true to the historical record but don’t serve much fictional purpose. The matter-of-fact narrative remains breezy, though the imagined dialogue can sound contrived. It takes decades for Sun Yomei to meet the fate that seems prophesied from the outset.
The redemption of a historical figure whose life ended in political disgrace.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781635423778
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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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