A fast-paced and charming colleagues-to-lovers tale for holiday romance fans.
A historical romance novella focuses on two coworkers in New York City during World War II.
Stella West is “Head of Holidays” for Hanover’s Department Store. This means she’s in charge of making the store as cheerful as possible for the upcoming Christmas holiday as well as ensuring that Hanover’s remains one of the top places to go for family fun and shopping. As if that weren’t a big enough job, Stella and Hector Donovan, the store’s press agent, just got word that the famous decorator who was hired to design and execute all 26 of Hanover’s beloved window displays has quit—just two days before the public unveiling. This year’s theme, “Home for the Holidays,” is especially poignant, as it’s 1942 and so many sons, husbands, friends, and family members are away, fighting in the war. So Stella cannot let Hanover’s and the shoppers down. Stella and Hector, plus a small group of Hanover’s staffers, work day and night to bring the holiday spirit to life. With their jobs on the line and a series of mishaps keeping everything from running smoothly—or as smoothly as decorating over 20 windows in two days can proceed—Stella and Hector are relying on each other more than ever before. And as they spend a lot of time together, the protagonists discover that contentment can be found with someone you truly care about. In this engaging novella, Joy delivers a tale of two co-workers who realize their love for each other as they frantically tackle a daunting project during the hectic holiday season. At one point, Stella decides that Hector is “handsome. More handsome than Cary Grant…Grant wasn’t funny. Hector was very funny.” In 160 pages, the author manages to pack a lot of hijinks and setbacks into the story, making for a brisk pace. While there is a scene in which Stella reminisces in vague terms about a shared private moment between her and Hector, the intimacy happens offstage, which makes this a welcome holiday read for those who prefer sweet romances.
A fast-paced and charming colleagues-to-lovers tale for holiday romance fans.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9798218213664
Page Count: 162
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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