An amiable drama that ends abruptly but delivers a timely environmentalist message.
In this third novella in Passel’s series, a woman helps her friend search for her missing daughter while struggling with identity issues of her own.
Passel picks up the continuing story of two friends, now in their 30s. MatiLou is living with her attorney husband, Bobby, in Raleigh, North Carolina, while PerryAnn remains in their New Mexico hometown, raising her 11-year-old daughter, Lily. When MatiLou receives an urgent message from PerryAnn saying that Lily is missing, she drives to New Mexico to help her friend. Meanwhile, MatiLou’s marriage has been complicated by Bobby’s insistence that she refrain from pro-environmental endeavors because they conflict with the interests of his clients, whom he’s successfully defended from complaints about dumping waste. Meanwhile, an escaped prisoner, Frank Bearl, is on the loose, and he confronts MatiLou when she stops at a Texarkana gas station. She frightens him off, but he reappears later on. MatiLou ably narrates a tale that deals with issues of heritage and conflicts of values. Both women are half Native American,and both struggle in their relationships with wealthy, White family members who seem unconcerned about their impact on the environment. The novel works well as a standalone, but it’s likely that readers of the earlier volumes will find themselves more invested in the plot, as, for them, it will be like revisiting old friends. Still, newcomers to the series are sure to find the main characters likable. One standout secondary player, Jen, a Native American elder, offers gentle, nonjudgmental counseling and moments of tranquility to MatiLou, offering a welcome respite from her struggle to reconnect with her heritage. Enough is left unresolved at the novella’s conclusion to suggest a sequel in the works.
An amiable drama that ends abruptly but delivers a timely environmentalist message.Pub Date: June 16, 2021
ISBN: 979-8521352531
Page Count: 117
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Like your third serving of a delicious meal—still very good, but not much excitement left.
The Steele family’s three-volume St. John adventure comes to a poignant end.
As the author warns in the foreword, if you haven’t read the first two books of this trilogy (Winter in Paradise, 2018; What Happens in Paradise, 2019), don’t start here. If you have, read this one slowly, because at the end we'll be saying goodbye to the series' endearing cast of transplanted Midwesterners, their new friends in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the many wonderful bars, restaurants, estates, bungalows, beaches, and seafaring vessels they frequent. In truth, you may find a leisurely pace easier to maintain than usual. The confounding mysteries and shocking reversals that drove the first two installments are wrapped up here, but the answers are pretty much as expected, and no new excitement is introduced. Threads that could have added a plot boost—a high-powered New York lawyer hired to deal with the devastation Irene Steele suffers as a result of her dead husband’s criminal activity, the FBI investigation into same, an old diary, an unplanned pregnancy—play out gently, or are dropped, instead of picking up the momentum. Hilderbrand’s choice to tell us in the introductory note about her fictionalization of Hurricane Irma takes away any element of surprise that might have had, and she doesn’t use the disaster for much in the way of plot, anyway. Oh, well. There are still plenty of lemongrass sugar cookies and a gorgonzola Caesar with pork belly and wood-grilled sirloin, served with an expensive bottle of cabernet pulled from the cellar of some annoying rich people, reviving the old joke about wine descriptions one last time: “Notes of fire coral, DEET and the Tide Pod challenge.” Just like everything else in 2020, this is not quite what you had hoped for, but, on the other hand, the comfort of a Hilderbrand novel is never something to sneer at.
Like your third serving of a delicious meal—still very good, but not much excitement left.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-31643-558-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Elegant and unsettling, this novel evades the expected at every turn.
A web of friendship among millennial Black women stretches across several decades.
Desiree, Nakia, January, and Monique grew up together. They haven’t all known each other since childhood, but they came into adulthood together, navigating the tumult of their 20s, 30s, and 40s. At the opening of Flournoy’s novel—the first since her acclaimed debut, The Turner House (2015)—Desiree is 22. The year is 2008 and she’s traveling to Zurich via Paris with her grandfather, who plans to die the next day through assisted suicide. Her grandfather is all the family she has; her mother is long dead, her father long absent, and her relationship with her older sister, Danielle, deeply strained. She feels herself adrift and without prospects, but as it turns out, Desiree’s destiny is, in large part, as the anchor of her friend group. Flournoy toggles back and forth in time and perspective across the women, a structure that makes the book feel more like linked stories than a novel with a typical narrative throughline. This enables each woman to be deeply, prismatically rendered: Monique is a librarian-turned-influencer; January is a melancholic mother of two sons; Nakia is a lesbian restaurateur. (Desiree’s sister, Danielle, receives a narrative interlude, as well.) They endure hookups and breakups, Covid-19, financial woes, careers, caregiving—“the wilderness of adult life.” It’s easy to marvel at Flournoy’s precision with character, the heart of the novel, but it’s the book’s hard look at social and political realities that give it its teeth. By setting select scenes—including the novel’s shattering climax—in the near future, Flournoy seems to warn that the violence and oppression characteristic of 21st-century American life can be mitigated only by community, care, and the families we choose.
Elegant and unsettling, this novel evades the expected at every turn.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780063318779
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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