An uneven but ultimately engaging tale of a reluctant go-getter.
A dissatisfied young mother finds that an unlikely friendship yields surprising results in Balko’s novel.
Olivia, a former project manager, has lately been working as a stay-at-home mom. She thinks that her successful Realtor neighbor Patricia has no flaws, and she resents it. In fact, she thinks of her as “perfect Patricia,” and her constant judgment of her—and of herself—essentially drives the novel. She struggles with insecurities brought on by a traumatic childhood with a difficult mother and an absent father, and her everyday stress and anxiety is compounded by the demands of motherhood. She has an affectionate husband, Steve, and a young daughter, Samantha, whom she loves dearly, but many of her thoughts are shaped by overwhelming self-doubt. When Olivia runs into Patricia while shopping at Target one day, her inability to speak up for herself inadvertently works to her advantage; she ends up going to lunch with Patricia, who offers her part-time work as her assistant. As they carve out a business relationship, the two women walk a rocky path toward friendship. Throughout, Olivia maintains a steady stream of self-deprecation that soon wears thin; as a result, readers may sometimes find it difficult to sympathize with her. Balko presents the two main characters as opposites, with Patricia a classic Type A personality and Olivia firmly Type D. This broad-stroke characterization is further imbalanced by Olivia’s biased, negative assessments; when the author has Olivia insinuate that Patricia is a narcissist, it doesn’t seem a fair judgment. Readers will find that the story takes a more appealing turn once Patricia inspires Olivia to tackle some personal goals, and when Olivia embraces her own vulnerability. Making major life plans and achieving them is admirable, and readers will cheer Olivia, even as she approaches the task with trepidation.
An uneven but ultimately engaging tale of a reluctant go-getter.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2024
ISBN: 978-1685133610
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 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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