A moving, lyrical tale of a strong young hero dealing with a terrifying disease.
In this coming-of-age historical novel, a girl learns of a horrific leper colony on Moloka’i in Hawaii.
In the late 19th century, Mele Bennett is a hapa-haole (mixed-race) girl. Her White father is Dr. Reed Bennett, who is with the Board of Health; her mother, Nahoa, is a Native Hawaiian. Their marriage is tested by the policy of forced resettlement to the colony on Moloka’i for all who are diagnosed with leprosy, and it is the Natives, the kanaka, who are almost exclusively susceptible. For those sent to the colony, it is a lonely life: They will never return to their homes and they will never see their loved ones again. Moreover, conditions are barely humane. Reed is very pained by this policy, but the science of the day dictates that such isolation is the only safeguard against an epidemic. He has to follow his conscience. Meanwhile, Mele’s childhood love, Keahi, finds a suspicious rash on his chest. Like many others, he escapes into the bush, where tracking him is almost impossible. This is when Mele discovers that her father is more than she thought and she begins to reconcile her White half and brown half, something that was tearing her apart. Anderson writes beautifully. The opening paragraph about Mele’s childhood house reveals a major theme of the book in just a few brush strokes of color. The scene in which young Jacob Maila is torn from his screaming mother by the authorities is truly heart-rending. And the arrogance of the powers that be (haole—White—of course) is infuriating. The author gives Mele, the first-person narrator, uncommon poetic gifts, as in streetlights “winking like stories wanting to be told” or when her father’s “voice crawled out of his throat” in an agonized reply. Almost every page offers such a treat. Readers will fervently hope that Anderson has more novels in her because this one is a winner.
A moving, lyrical tale of a strong young hero dealing with a terrifying disease.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73549-060-1
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Love Song Graphics
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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