A quick read with some depth.
Thrown together after their father’s death, two half sisters from different worlds find common ground.
When Vivian Levy, a 30-year-old sommelier from New York City, pulls up to her late father’s vacation house in Fox Hill, Maine, she’s confronted by someone she never thought she’d meet. In fact, Vivian wasn’t even sure Lucy Webster actually existed. But there she is, looking both like and not like Vivian. It’s Lucy’s job to inform Vivian that they are half sisters, and Vivian’s job to break the news that their father just died. Hank Levy kept Lucy a secret from Vivian (although she had suspicions), whereas Lucy, who grew up with her mother in Maine, knew about Vivian and always dreamed of meeting her. Unfortunately, it seems that their shared paternity is the only thing the women have in common. Lucy—who rarely spent time with Hank except for every July in the Fox Hill house—idolized her father. Vivian, who was raised on the Upper West Side and had every material advantage, resented her father for never being proud of her and for keeping this giant secret. Vivian wants to sell the house so she can use the money to open a wine bar with her obviously sleazy married boss/boyfriend. Lucy, recently separated from her high school sweetheart, is desperate to hold on to any shred of normalcy, and therefore wants to keep the house—despite, as Vivian constantly reminds her, having no legal claim to it. Orenstein should have edited out several side-plots to streamline the novel to its heart: the growing relationship between the estranged sisters. If you can move past the flawed conceit (no one in Maine would have mentioned Lucy to Vivian?) and the stilted dialogue, Orenstein’s novel has just enough charm to carry it through.
A quick read with some depth.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851555
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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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