An absorbing tale of friendship that’s endearing as often as it’s unabashedly riotous.
The lives of the owner of a house-painting business and a teen runaway intersect in Barrett’s comic novel.
Waking up next to a dead woman would unsettle most people. But 31-year-old Sammy Davis Junior (Junior is his surname) is more worried about making it to Saturday brunch. His apparent apathy regarding the late bedmate—his regular hookup for the past month—makes South Tampa Det. O’Hare suspicious. Elsewhere, Penny Sullivan, torn up by guilt over her big sister, Catelyn’s death, has run away from home to evade boarding school. The 15-year-old travels under her sister’s name and feigns the background of a Canadian backpacker. Looking for a place to squat, Penny enters the orbit of a house-painting crew, a business Sammy and his two friends have run since high school. As she joins them on a multiday gig at the same location where she’s secretly bunking, Penny unexpectedly bonds with the older men. They play silly games, like dreaming up the most offbeat haiku, and execute well-planned pranks on local businesses. Penny and Sammy are more alike than either of them realizes; they both have father issues—Penny is certain her father doesn’t care about her, and Sammy resists taking over the multinational family business, despite his father’s wishes. The two must come to terms with their personal relationships as well as their more practical circumstances, as people are searching for Penny, and Sammy, even with his father’s “expensive lawyers,” is still tied to someone’s death.
Barrett’s story definitely has its share of morbid humor—despite the body in his bed, Sammy is blasé during the detective’s interview: “I think we’re all pretty shaken up by this whole scene,” he says. “So, I can go now?” Lowbrow jokes also pop up on occasion, including a particularly gross scene involving beer that no one should drink. The characters practically burst with personality, especially Penny, Sammy, and Sammy’s co-owners, Mealy and Beer. Penny, who’s lost both her mom and sister, has no friends, and these men offer the camaraderie that she needs. Most of their pranks, even when they cause a ruckus at a deli or a fast-food restaurant, are genuinely funny and not malicious. As much of the bonding between Penny and the crew occurs while they’re painting a house, dialogue-laden scenes are abundant. These are moments for characters to pass the time with games and trading off quips, but the author doesn’t neglect to develop the story as well, as Penny seems to gain a fondness for Mealy, who shows her kindness from the very beginning. All of that dialogue, presented in brief chapters alternating between narrators Penny and Sammy, stokes the brisk narrative pace. The final act effectively wraps up the protagonists’ individual stories, though Penny’s is the more convincing and rewarding of the two. The denouement is a bit of a swerve but unquestionably memorable.
An absorbing tale of friendship that’s endearing as often as it’s unabashedly riotous.Pub Date: April 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781685131821
Page Count: 291
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2023
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
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
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