A satisfying examination of one woman’s journey of self-discovery.
A woman in her mid-50s embarks on a solo adventure and finds herself in the process.
When Ammalie Brinks’ husband, Vincent, died, they had only recently become empty nesters. This new loss was too soon, and Ammalie worries that if she had acted faster when he had the stroke, if she had known what to do, perhaps he wouldn’t have died. Instead, she’s been left on her own. Her son, Powell, has asked for space while he processes his father’s death; her closest friend, Mari, is confronting marriage troubles; and her sister, Apricot, is struggling with her health. With no one holding her back, Ammalie sets off on her own, telling no one where exactly she’s going. She begins a journey to visit three specific locations, many thousands of miles apart, using old keys to gain entry. To reach these places—one she visited with Vincent and two he visited without her—she sleeps in her car, eats canned goods from the container, and often forgoes indoor plumbing. She hopes the trip will reveal more to her about Vincent, but as she runs into challenges, the person she ends up learning about is herself. Told in a close third person, the book follows Ammalie as she meets exciting people as well as wobbles off-kilter from too much time alone, talking to her belongings and failing to adequately care for her physical needs. The author deftly depicts the escalating loneliness and fear Ammalie feels as hours on her own accumulate. Because of the solo nature of her journey, a large chunk of the book takes place inside Ammalie’s head, which does slow things down. Even so, the author’s nuanced descriptions of Ammalie’s determination, joy, and trepidation as she meets people, as well as the lessons she takes away from each of the encounters, are engaging enough to get you through the slower portions. The book examines weighty topics like grief, marriage struggles, and growing older in a manner that is thought-provoking and insightful.
A satisfying examination of one woman’s journey of self-discovery.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780593724200
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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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