A less-focused but affecting installment about earnest Southern teens.
A young gay man confronts his town and its history in the fourth novel in the Croy Cycle series.
It’s 1970, the summer before basketball star Jake Jacobs’ senior year, and he’s just passed on a chance to spend it in Paris, France, with his thespian mother. Instead, he wants to remain in Croy, Oklahoma, where he moved two years ago. Things aren’t quite what they used to be—his friend and old crush, Randy Edom, hasn’t been around since he graduated and inherited a large sum of money—but Jake’s best pal, Joanie Tibbits, is still around. He also has a new flame, Beau Hamilton, a sensitive musician who enjoys secretly wearing women’s undergarments. Together with other friends, Jake and Beau form a rock band called the Quirks—a nod to its members’ idiosyncrasies—and find cathartic musical expression for their angst. Joanie, the editor of the school paper, launches an investigation into a controversial sculpture that once adorned the local library. Why was it removed, and what became of it? Randy returns home to take care of his ailing mother, Virginia, and come to terms with some family history that he’s ignored for too long. The era’s cultural upheavals also begin to manifest in the town’s social life: Young men are coming home from Vietnam with unspoken horror stories locked up in their injured bodies, and many in Croy are unwilling to accept loves and lifestyles that don’t conform to conservative Christian morality. Jake has just one year left in town, but is that enough time to put its ghosts to rest?
Over the course of this novel, Ceci effectively infuses the prose with the well-developed personalities of its characters, as when Randy visits his sick mother: “Virginia smiled like she’d just awoken from a good dream. She waved one of her IV lines. ‘You look like you could use some of this.’ ‘Does it kill the pain?’ ‘No. It just sets it in a corner.’ ” At another point, the work gets across the exuberance that the characters feel when performing music: “Jake grinned and covered his ears. Belle looked like she was howling, but he couldn’t hear her.” Although the previous two books in the series worked well as stand-alone YA novels, this one relies more heavily on storylines established in the earlier volumes; as such, fans of the Croy Cycle are sure to appreciate this latest entry, but new readers would do well to catch up with previous books first. Overall, it feels less like a standard YA tale than a larger story of small-town life and the interactions of families that have deep, interconnected roots. As in the previous entries, there’s a queer coming-of-age storyline, but here, it’s somewhat diluted by other, less urgent plotlines. For example, the library sculpture seems to hold a lot of metaphorical weight, but the reader may have trouble getting too invested in its fate. (Crosby’s occasional black-and-white line drawings feature characters and objects from the text.)
A less-focused but affecting installment about earnest Southern teens.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73473-897-1
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Les Croyens Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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