Nothing to marvel at.
A young actor in Victorian-era London is determined to save an African woman from an evil theater owner.
Twenty-year-old Zillah, the narrator of Dillsworth’s debut novel, has far from a charmed life, but she’s come a long way from “the slums of St. Giles,” the London neighborhood where she was raised. Or has she? The young woman, the child of a Black mother and White father, has an acting gig, but it’s a pretty bad one: She plays the “Great Amazonia,” “a dangerous savage from darkest Africa,” at a theater company run by a leering creep named Marcus Crillick. (Both Zillah and Crillick know the Amazon isn’t in Africa, but they assume, correctly, that their audiences won’t care.) Zillah has been living with her lover, Crillick’s friend the aristocrat Vincent Woodward, at Crillick’s house. Zillah sees Vincent as her ticket out of the theater, but things get complicated when she meets Lucien Winters, a Black grocer who loathes Zillah’s act and wants to “save” her from it. Zillah manages to withstand the humiliation she feels when she performs in blackface (Crillick thinks she’s “not Black enough” as it is to play Amazonia), but when the theater owner introduces a new act to his patrons, a terrified African woman he calls the “Leopard Lady,” Zillah despairs for the newcomer’s safety, suspecting she’s been kidnapped. Zillah becomes determined to save the woman, knowing that it will mean the end of her career at the theater; meanwhile, she learns an unwelcome secret about Vincent’s family. With the exception of Zillah, all the characters are flat archetypes—Crillick is cartoonishly evil; Vincent and Lucien are both bland though are apparently meant to be charming. While Dillsworth does a decent job of evoking Victorian London and her pacing isn’t terrible, readers will see the plot twists, such as they are, coming a mile (kilometre?) away. Dillsworth shows some promise, but this novel never manages to rise above the level of unremarkable.
Nothing to marvel at.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-35-862-791-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
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
SEEN & HEARD
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