A charming novel about how family can be destiny.
In Lloyd’s latest novel, a single woman’s life is upended by her unstable brother.
Yes, Mona Lisa Buttaro was named after the famous Leonardo da Vinci painting, and yes, she hates her name. After a lifetime of jokes, she’s more or less the last Buttaro standing: Her father has been dead for over 10 years, her mother lives in a retirement community, and her brother, the clinically paranoid and germophobic Joey, resides in a group home. Three months ago, Mona, 37, moved into the old family house in Seattle to clean it out and sell it. She’s also taken over operation of the family restaurant, Booty’s Cafe. She’s barely keeping it together—the long hours, the house, her mother’s Doberman, Figaro—when two intrusions make her life even more complicated. The first is Joey, who (along with the voice in his head named Saint Signore) leaves the group home and moves himself back into the house unannounced. The second is Cliff, the most popular guy from her high school class, who’s now a hot single-dad contractor. Cliff, who runs into Mona at Booty’s, volunteers his services as she prepares the house for sale. Mona has been unlucky in love for so long that she can’t help but wonder if Cliff might be the answer to her prayers. That is, if Joey and his voices (and her mother’s unexpected second marriage…and a secret half sibling reappearing out of nowhere) don’t screw it up. Mona narrates most of the novel, though some chapters follow Cliff and Joey as well. Lloyd’s prose is buoyant and engaging throughout: “Since Joey started working at Booty’s, his life had been warped out of shape, stretched and twisted to conform to Moni’s daily routine. He’d been determined to find a way to squirm out of going to the restaurant ever again—until last night, when his world went topsy-turvy.” Less a romantic comedy than a partly heightened story of a slightly dysfunctional Italian American family, the novel will win readers over with its deftly drawn characters and spirited scenes.
A charming novel about how family can be destiny.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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