An engrossing story about a young woman taking chances to find her way after college.
A young woman follows her dreams against the backdrops of Sicily and San Francisco in Constantino’s novel.
Mariella Russo has just finished her undergraduate degree at the University of Catania in 2000. She’s lived her whole life in the Sicilian town, feeling trapped by tradition and expectations. Her volatile mother expects Mariella to marry her boyfriend Matteo, the scion of the wealthy Gamberini family, coveting the elevated social standing the match will bestow upon the Russos. Although she loves Matteo, Mariella does not want to get married, feeling that they are both “caught in the same snare of family and tradition.” Her beloved grandmother, Nonna Giuseppina, understands her restlessness, saying, “If you remain here, they’ll never leave you alone.” After a disastrous graduation party (during which she publicly defies everyone’s plans for her), Mariella secretly escapes to America. Helped by Nonna and Luisa, the owner of the travel agency where Mariella works, she is admitted to graduate school at San Francisco State University. She arrives in San Francisco to find that her roommate, Leslie, is a gay man; he becomes a good friend. Through his connections, she lands a job as a part-time hostess at a high-end Italian restaurant in North Beach. The restaurant staff provides companionship and a romantic relationship with Giovanni, the restaurant owner, who is substantially older than her. A dramatic appearance by Mamma in a bid to bring her home causes Mariella to re-examine her actions and relationships. In her debut novel, Constantino has created a forthright and bold character who owns up to her faults and grows as she matures. Mariella’s choices are skillfully put in perspective in the contexts of the Sicilian and San Francisco communities she lives in and in the backstories of Nonna, who defied tradition in the 1940s by following her heart, and Giovanni, whose unhappy marriage shows that following expectations does not always result in happiness. Readers will easily relate to this enjoyable and honest depiction of the conflicting desires and expectations faced by many people in their 20s.
An engrossing story about a young woman taking chances to find her way after college.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781647427689
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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