A finely crafted novel about sidelined dreams and second chances.
A would-be frontwoman gets a later-in-life shot at stardom in Wilke’s novel.
Back in the 1980s, teenage Libby Conlin was the lead singer of the Los Angeles rock band Liberty, who could have been the next big thing if Libby hadn’t gotten pregnant before they could secure a major label deal. Now, she works as the bookkeeper for a shop in Hollywood; she’s a single empty-nester since her youngest went off to college. The nest does not remain empty for long: Her semi-estranged 35-year-old daughter Bridget—the one whose birth interrupted Libby’s music career—arrives out of the blue one day at Libby’s Beachwood Canyon home, newly divorced and in need of a place to stay. Libby invites her in, hoping this might prove an opportunity to repair their strained relationship. Both women decide to go back to school—Libby aims to become a full-fledged CPA, and Bridget intends to pursue an old, abandoned interest in filmmaking. As part of a documentary project, Bridget ends up uploading some of Libby’s old Liberty demos to the internet—and the internet responds. With industry interest bubbling, Libby may finally have a shot at the stardom she never achieved in her youth, and Bridget may have the chance to assuage the guilt she feels for derailing her mother’s career. But will this opportunity finally bring them together—or tear them apart for good? Wilke’s prose is chatty and fluid, pulling the reader along with Libby and Bridget as they dip their toes back into the waters of art and romance. Though the two leads are in different places in life, they both feel too old to be where they are, which adds a compelling twist to the mother-daughter dynamic. (“Please don’t revert to being a teenager, Bridget,” Libby scolds her daughter at one point. “We already did that bit, and we’re both too old for a replay.”) The music industry material and Los Angeles setting add fun color, but readers will most appreciate the attention Wilke pays to her characters’ inner lives.
A finely crafted novel about sidelined dreams and second chances.Pub Date: April 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781960573704
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
