An entertaining ride, full of glamour and intrigue.
A middle-aged woman encounters the dark underbelly of the ballroom dance world in Paul’s novel.
Ava Thompson escapes the boredom and loneliness of being an empty nester by signing up for ballroom dance lessons at a local studio called DanceFreak. Despite being kicked out of ballet school as a kid, Ava quickly becomes enamored of the glamour of ballroom culture, and of her young Hungarian instructor, Nandi. She struggles with extreme stage fright in performance but keeps booking more classes and entering competitions, determined to succeed. Dance quickly becomes an addiction, and things start to spiral out of control, including her finances, her crush on Nandi, and her growing alienation from her husband. When one of the instructors, Laszlo, dies at a hotel during a competition, Ava learns that all is not well behind the scenes at DanceFreak: The instructors are forced into exploitative contracts, the studio owner gives free lessons to friends of a “connected” Russian, and Laszlo is rumored to have harbored secret information before he died. Ava begins to suspect that his death was not an accident, and that she and the others at the studio may be in danger if she keeps digging. This is a page-turning novel with an intimate, tell-all quality, as if Ava is dictating her memoir or spilling secrets to a close friend. The reader is drawn into the glamour and idiosyncrasies of the ballroom dance subculture with descriptions that fully capture Ava’s awe: “The cycle of comp energy…begins with a burst of enthusiasm and anticipation, swells in the see-and-be-seen environment of the fancy hotel, and comes to a peak when the dancers compete.” Though the narrative finds the characters involved in an organized criminal enterprise, the tone remains gossipy rather than dark. Paul also deftly weaves in commentary on women struggling with feelings of “invisibility" as they navigate middle age.
An entertaining ride, full of glamour and intrigue.Pub Date: June 2, 2025
ISBN: 9798285553526
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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