A beautifully written tale of a woman trying to find herself via a walk through England and France.
Davies’ novella follows one woman’s journey to find herself—on foot.
Elena Lees is tired—tired of her nursing job, tired of her boyfriend. Basically, she’s tired of her life. So, one day, the Australian ex-pat quits her job in London and starts walking. And walking. And walking. Save for the ferry from Dover to Calais and a couple of train rides, she walks from the bustling city of London through the beautiful countryside of France to the Alps. Elena’s journey is mostly premeditated—she takes practice walks and self-defense classes, and discards needless possessions before her hike—but the journey itself brings some unplanned moments, including meeting (and sleeping with) a man dressed as a priest, picking up a guitar and soothing passengers on a stalled train outside of Paris with her music, and stumbling across an injured hiker named Dev, who helps her along her way. All the while, she often dreams, or hallucinates, about her mother, her co-workers, her former patients, and other people in her life. Eventually, the trek does its trick, and Elena is refreshed and ready to go—but whether that means back to London or forward to more adventures on the road is left up to readers. (“The only thing I know right now, is I have a mountain to climb. The rest will somehow become apparent. I strangely trust that.”) Though the book recalls Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012) and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996), those bestsellers about isolation in the wilderness are much more menacing than this mild amble. Elena has her rough days, and one particularly scary tumble, but her journey is largely devoid of real drama, and that’s fine; instead of fearing what waits around the next corner, readers can enjoy the author’s lyrical prose and the endearing Elena. Davies has created a character and a scenario that many readers can relate to, and while most won’t shut their doors and set out to walk across entire countries, they can certainly relate to the impulse—and maybe learn a bit from Elena’s journey.
A beautifully written tale of a woman trying to find herself via a walk through England and France.Pub Date: March 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781739184032
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Spring Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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