A striking novel of a changing New York City.
A young girl gets married in an attempt to secure her freedom from domestic drudgery in Rubin’s prequel to In the Hands of Women (2023), set in the late 19th century.
In 1879, Tillie Isaacson is growing up on her father’s chicken farm in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood; she’s the daughter of Sam and Sarah Isaacson, Jewish people who emigrated from antisemitic Germany. Tillie is brimming with intellectual curiosity and academic ambition, and her mother encourages her to pursue lofty aspirations. But her life changes drastically when Sarah suddenly dies and Sam marries Rebecca,who wants Tillie to abandon her dreams of attending high school to help her run the household. Also, as farmland dwindles in Manhattan, Sam moves the family to Sullivan County, north of the city—the beginning of the end of their way of life, which author Rubin elegiacally portrays. As Sam melancholically puts it, “Our farming world’s shrinking fast.” Tillie figures she can stay in Manhattan and attend school if she finds a husband, so she marries Abe Levine, an enterprising businessman who sells buttons to dressmakers. Her strategy backfires, however, since her home is prohibitively far from the high school, and the arrival of children brings precisely the domestic burdens she wanted to avoid. She comes to find the city a “vile place,” rife with squalor and filled with people who feel “faceless, empty of hope, full of desperation.” Over the course of this novel, Rubin thoughtfully chronicles Tillie’s indefatigable efforts to make her life livable, first by becoming a teacher of English, and then a devoted mother and successful businesswoman. The best aspect of this novel is the tableau it paints of New York City at the turn of the century: infinitely expanding and modernizing, while also overwhelmed by bigotry and misogyny. Readers will find the author’s prose to be unembellished and largely bland. Nonetheless, the plot is dramatically powerful, and Tillie is a memorably dauntless protagonist.
A striking novel of a changing New York City.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781685125813
Page Count: 358
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
