An engaging and topical tale of politics and journalistic ethics with a feminist slant.
A successful journalist with a dark secret mentors an ambitious young reporter in this debut novel.
After an embarrassing career misstep and ugly breakup, 25-year-old Megan Barnes flees New York City and heads back home to the Chicago suburbs for a fresh start. But life in the Windy City isn’t without its complications. Her mother is running for Congress as a Republican, much to the dismay of her left-leaning daughter, and the single job interview Megan lands is a bust. At a rally against sexual assault, she tussles with an angry misogynist, capturing the attention of her personal hero, Jocelyn Jones, an icon of journalism “right up there with Diane Sawyer, Christiane Amanpour, and Leslie Stahl.” Soon, Megan has been hired to assist with PR for Jocelyn’s upcoming memoir, with the promise of a glowing recommendation and referral to an editor at the Chicago Tribune once the job is done. But when an anonymous Twitter user starts hinting about a scandal in Jocelyn’s past, the devoted Megan discovers there’s more to her idol than it appears. In her book, Smith spins a brisk, engrossing tale about an idealistic, occasionally naïve woman who finds her neat assumptions about the world challenged by a messy reality. Megan’s relationship with her overprotective, conservative mother is believably fraught, and her desire to find a strong female role model in Jocelyn is palpable. The author tackles weighty topics, including abortion and the right/left political divide, with grace and finesse. Despite their differences, Megan and her mother are ultimately able to find a common ground. Meanwhile, Jocelyn’s liberal bona fides can’t hide her rotten core. While the idea that a few vague tweets would prompt a full-blown “crisis which could damage” Jocelyn’s reputation and prompt a “horde of reporters” to camp out on her doorstep seems a stretch, Smith manages to sell it. Ultimately, Megan learns an important lesson for anyone, journalist or not: There’s a danger in making judgments based on feelings rather than cold, hard facts.
An engaging and topical tale of politics and journalistic ethics with a feminist slant.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64538-262-1
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Ten16 Press
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A delightfully nostalgic novel about how the things we loved in the past have the power to shape our future.
A boy band cruise is the site of one woman’s post-divorce healing.
Annie never meant to end up alone on a Boy Talk cruise, but that’s exactly what happens when her sister breaks a leg and has to bow out of their vacation. Now Annie is sharing a cabin with a stranger, stuck on the cruise ship American Fantasy with the 1990s band—and thousands of their biggest fans, known as Talkers. Annie doesn’t consider herself a Talker, even if she was a fan back in the day. But reeling from a recent divorce and dealing with complex feelings about turning 50, Annie throws herself into the distraction of the trip. What she doesn’t expect is to truly connect with the music, the band, the other fans, and herself. As Annie observes, “This was why people turned to religion or watched the Super Bowl at a sports bar instead of alone in their living room. It felt good to be a part of something where your passion was celebrated instead of mocked.” All the Talkers dream of having a special bond with “the guys,” but when Annie actually does meet Keith, a Boy Talk member who’s clearly going through a hard time, she wonders if their connection is real or if she’s just as delusional as the other (mostly) women on the ship. Straub depicts a wonderfully immersive world aboard the American Fantasy, one where each woman assigns herself a favorite guy and everyone is bedecked in Boy Talk merch. For five days, the Talkers live in a fantasy world where the only thing that matters is their connection with a band that meant everything to them so many years ago. As Annie puts it, “Inside her head, which is where she heard the music, it had touched some lever so deep that it couldn’t be reversed…the music was a direct vein to her own childhood, the least complicated part of her life.”
A delightfully nostalgic novel about how the things we loved in the past have the power to shape our future.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798217046850
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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