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TWO WEEKS OF SUMMER

A slightly uneven but often sweet coming-of-age tale.

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A woman babysits her niece and learns some important lessons in Tirado-Ryen’s novel.

It’s 2005 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and 26-year-old Kim Kincaid has been tasked with babysitting her 6-year-old niece, Summer, while Kim’s older sister, Dena Nordstrom, is on vacation with her husband at a ski resort for two weeks. Kim is ill-equipped to take care of a child—pretty much the only sustenance in her house at the moment is leftover Chinese takeout and vodka—but she resents the fact that her sister thinks she’d be bad at it. The novel jumps around a bit, presenting flashbacks of Kim’s relationships with her family members, but most of the story follows Kim as she adjusts to taking care of a young child. She struggles at first, but she and Summer do eventually bond, and Kim learns that she can be a responsible adult when she tries. Readers also meet her best friend, Jillian Martin, who has a big personality; she’s having an affair with her married boss. Kim’s also starting to have doubts about Jared McKenzie, her boyfriend of two years, who comes off as a jerk; he’s so awful, in fact, that readers may find it hard to muster much sympathy as Kim decides whether to break up with him. This is a layered story, with complicated relationships between Kim and her late mother, between Kim and Dena, and between Kim and her friends and boyfriend; the siblings’ parents consider Dena to be the family’s golden child, and Kim struggles to get out of her shadow, which increases her insecurity in other areas of her life. Some flashbacks feel a bit unnecessary, revealing little that readers can’t gather from the main storyline; for example, in 2005, Kim has an encounter with a woman who bullied her in high school, and readers can easily infer how mean that woman is, but the author includes a flashback of her bullying Kim in the past, anyway. Overall, though, this is a pleasing story of a young woman deciding what she wants.

A slightly uneven but often sweet coming-of-age tale.

Pub Date: July 10, 2023

ISBN: 9798218334741

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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THE ACADEMY

A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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