A reflective tale of growing up creative in a stifling environment and finding true love.
An elderly woman looks back on her childhood on a farm during the Great Depression and her later career as a dancer in Caugherty’s debut novel.
In 2006, Irene Larsen is almost 90 and living in comfort at the Golden Manor retirement community. Despite some health problems, she has a pleasant existence that includes spending time with her group of friends at the home and regular visits with her daughter, Deirdre. She’s also secretly recording her memoir on an old tape recorder, which makes up the bulk of this book. Irene grew up on a farm in a Mormon family in Paradise, Utah, and in 1932, “Wall Street and its problems…seemed as distant as a foreign land you might read about in the paper, reflect upon idly then quickly forget.” They worked tirelessly, and Irene helped with picking fruit and canning while her father and brothers tended to the wheat fields. Unfortunately, her younger brother Jeremiah was stricken with scarlet fever and died, which sent her mother into a deep depression. The price of wheat fell, and the financial situation on the farm became dire, but Irene found solace singing in school musical productions. Encouraged by a brother at Brigham Young University, Irene applied to study music there and was accepted. However, a summer gig at a Utah resort led to a relationship with a snappy young dancer, which threatened Irene’s relationship with her conservative family. Over the course of this bright novel, Caugherty manages to seamlessly transition between two wildly different decades while maintaining a fresh, youthful voice—which is essential in a book about an ambitious dreamer who struggles through hard times. Insights about farm life, the Depression, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are plentiful throughout the narrative, which is populated with many references to 1930s songs as it showcases Irene’s obvious talent. It’s a hopeful yet realistic story, and the letters that Irene receives from her future husband are a particular joy to read.
A reflective tale of growing up creative in a stifling environment and finding true love.Pub Date: April 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68433-478-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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