An intriguing pair of plots about women’s reproductive rights starts off strong but goes astray.
A contemporary woman’s quest to have a baby is interwoven with a historical legal case about involuntary sterilization.
In the present day, the narrator is Jessa Gidney, a young lawyer at a Manhattan law firm who lives in a posh Upper East Side apartment with her husband, Vance, a hunky finance guy. Sounds pretty sweet, but Jessa’s growing obsession with getting pregnant and her ongoing failure to do so are putting massive strain on her job and marriage. Orphaned when her parents died in a car crash, she was raised by her doting grandmother and feels driven to continue the family line. When she takes on a pro bono case helping Isobel Pérez, an undocumented immigrant, avoid deportation, she learns that while in detention her client was surgically sterilized without giving consent—and Isobel isn’t the only one. The book’s historical plot focuses on Carrie Buck, a real person who in 1927 was the plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell. Carrie was born to a single mother, grew up in poverty, and had little education. After she was raped as a teenager, she bore a daughter who was immediately taken from her. She became a test case for a Virginia eugenics law that allowed the state to sterilize “promiscuous” or “feebleminded” women, with or without their consent. The court ruled the law was constitutional, and the eugenics theories it was based on became a foundation for the Holocaust. As Jessa passionately pursues Isobel’s case, she learns shocking secrets, some too close to home. For the first part of the book, the interlinked stories, the abuses of the women in the detention center, and the women’s engaging voices make a compelling combination. But in the last portion, the stories of Carrie and the immigrants drop into the background and Jessa takes over. Some of her successes, though, are unconvincing, and the plot ends up with too many loose ends.
An intriguing pair of plots about women’s reproductive rights starts off strong but goes astray.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781400347308
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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