An intriguing art- and history-filled tribute to an oft-overlooked dynamic woman.
Fernandez’s historical novel chronicles the life of Vincent van Gogh’s sister-in-law, whose passion and tireless efforts brought recognition and fame to the prolific artist’s work.
Jo van Gogh has been married to Vincent’s brother Theo for just 22 months. After suffering a mental breakdown, Theo has been in an institution for the past three months, and Jo awaits his return. She opens the door to her brother Dries, expecting to see her husband standing with him. Instead, Dries tells her that Theo has died, leaving Jo to raise their infant son alone and bequeathing her Vincent’s works (this occurs barely half a year after the painter’s suicide). Theo was the manager of a prestigious gallery in Paris’ artsy Montmartre district, and he was his brother’s enthusiastic representative. But Vincent’s bold impressionist paintings are treated with disdain by Paris’ elite traditionalist art purveyors, and they are the ones who control the market. A distraught Jo faces a decision—her father wants her to leave Paris and move back to her family home in Holland with the baby Vincentje, but she refuses to live under his rule again. Instead, she rents a boarding house in the small Dutch town of Bussum and turns it into a guesthouse. She brings with her Vincent’s extensive collection of original paintings and drawings, which she intends to exhibit and begin selling. With Theo’s devotion to his brother and her own passion for her brother-in-law’s paintings and drawings as her inspirations, Jo enters a battle fraught with danger, working determinedly to combat her own insecurities (“She’d always doubted herself, always assumed others knew best”) and the scorn of family, friends, and Vincent’s enemies. Through prodigious research, which involved combing through Vincent’s letters to Theo and their fragile sister, Fernandez crafts a compelling narrative that depicts Vincent’s internal struggles as well as the cutthroat business side of the art world and the societal changes roiling the turn of the century. Despite occasionally repetitive descriptions of the paintings, readers are likely to find themselves searching out images of the works Fernandez portrays so lovingly.
An intriguing art- and history-filled tribute to an oft-overlooked dynamic woman.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781647428709
Page Count: 384
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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