Both an insightful depiction of therapy supporting growth and a dead-on skewering of corporate culture.
A stressed-out bank executive questions what she really wants in life in Wierman’s novel.
“Standing there in pajamas she’d been wearing for most of the last month, milky face pale, red hair wild,” Chicago-based Madeline, 49, tells her fiancé, Rob, that she is scared she is going crazy since she just found a missing earring in an unexpected place in their apartment. He sympathetically reminds her, “I think your world has been pretty well upended.” The novel then flashes back to six months earlier, when Madeline, on the way to her job as a senior vice president at National Megabank, spots and brings home a stray that reminds her of the cat that her grandmother, who raised her, took away from her as a child; the incident seems to spark something in her. Madeline then, as usual, gets emmeshed in time-sucking work meetings and demands from her boss. She has recently started seeing Olivia, a therapist who has her explore her feelings more thoroughly than she ever has before. Madeline makes the momentous decision to quit her job, shocking her married best friend, Emma, who also works at the bank and is now contemplating the promise of a promotion. Will Madeline find her true vocation? Can Emma advance at the bank while also balancing being a wife and mother? The author notes that she quit jobs with Fortune 500 companies after decades of “building a career that was lucrative, ego-boosting, and a little bit soul-crushing.” Anyone who has toiled in corporate America will appreciate the inclusion of nagging corporate email correspondence and a fake-nice CEO—there are plenty of laugh-wince moments to enjoy in this novel. Wierman also masterfully delves into deeper psychological ground as Madeline’s reckonings with her issues are dramatically realized in interactions with Olivia and others.
Both an insightful depiction of therapy supporting growth and a dead-on skewering of corporate culture.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 978-1684632169
Page Count: 400
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2023
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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