A thrilling, memorable tale of struggle, style, and organized crime.
A young fashion industry hopeful learns hard lessons in life and business in Thompson’s novel.
The author parlays her decades of experience in New York City’s fashion industry into this crafty, provocative novel. In 1979, Cathy Callahan, a pretty Fashion Institute of Technology grad, diligently works at Starlight, a moderately priced eveningwear fashion house, but she dreams about launching her own line. Her roommates, Heather and Julie, also have high hopes for careers in the field, but all three are simultaneously disillusioned and terrified when they learn of the stranglehold organized crime families have on the fashion industry at large. After Starlight’s owner is murdered, the business closes, and Cathy moves on to work at another house, an opportunity that ends disastrously with a sexual harassment ordeal. A summer share in the Hamptons seems like the perfect respite, as Cathy falls for dashing, wealthy Wall Street investment banker Matt Sullivan, who’s more than prepared to financially and emotionally support her entrepreneurial aspirations. When her new eveningwear line is featured in Women’s Wear Daily, a firestorm of attention ensues as increasingly brazen Mafia hits occur around Manhattan. When the racketeers sniff out the amount of revenue her line is generating, they begin to infiltrate Cathy’s business operations, but she’s become both street-smart and business-savvy enough to outsmart them. Or has she? With vivid details, swift plotting, and crisp dialogue, Thompson writes with knowledgeable authority, effectively capturing the flare, flash, and wild decadence of the glittery era of the early 1980s, name-checking all of the iconic designers who made waves on the runways and on the Studio 54 dance floor. Beneath the melodrama and cutthroat antics (“A large meat hook hung by a one-inch-thick wire bolted to the ceiling. In the corner of one wall hung an array of torture tools”), the novel also makes statements about women in business and their enduring struggle to be seen, heard, and taken seriously. The sweet happy ending will please romance fans, but the cautionary themes simmering at the novel’s core give it credibility and grit.
A thrilling, memorable tale of struggle, style, and organized crime.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Winthrop House
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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