An uplifting tale about family, second chances, and the complexity of making fine Texas wine.
After the death of her husband, a young woman moves back to her hometown to build a new life for herself and her children in this novel.
Lark Mead has just lost her husband to Lou Gehrig’s disease and is faced with the daunting task of raising their two sons on her own. When a real estate broker comes calling soon after her husband’s death, Lark is offended. But after learning how much the house is worth, she decides that a return to her hometown may just be the fresh start her family needs. When she arrives back in Fredericksburg, Texas, she finds a newly renovated, not-so-child-friendly house and grandparents that are very busy with lives of their own. Lark begins searching for employment, but there aren’t many jobs for attorneys in town, and she’s not that interested in the law anyway. Instead, she decides to pursue a career in winemaking, a dream she had long ago given up. As Lark reconnects with old friends and attempts to navigate single motherhood, she meets a handsome, young Army veteran named Wyatt Gifford. As Lark and Wyatt get to know each other, she learns he has emotional baggage of his own, and she begins to doubt their compatibility. As the story progresses, Lark wonders whether she will ever figure out how to find a promising future. Told primarily from Lark’s point of view, the narrative shifts periodically to Wyatt’s perspective, providing readers a useful second lens through which to view events. Full of humorous moments about the pitfalls of parenting, including kids who say inappropriate things at the worst times and catty parent volunteers who attempt to commandeer school events, this plot-focused tale also explores deeper issues like grief, PTSD, and self-sufficiency. Although Clink’s series opener gets off to a slow start, introducing too many subplots and supporting characters before focusing on the main action, individual scenes are well crafted throughout, and relationships consistently come across as authentic. A few surprises toward the story’s end make it a worthwhile read.
An uplifting tale about family, second chances, and the complexity of making fine Texas wine.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68463-073-8
Page Count: 376
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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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