The marriage of shallow suspense plot and deep character study creates the wrong kind of page-turner.
An unhappy interaction between a private school teacher and a difficult student inspires a decadeslong revenge scheme.
From the title out, Gordon’s 20th book aspires to be a snappy, plot-driven novel with a premise based on reality TV—a socially current, Jodi Picoult–ish type of book. Agnes Vaughan, an art teacher at the Lydia Farnsworth School in New England, tries to embrace an extraordinarily miserable and universally disliked student named Heidi Stolz. But her suggestion that Heidi take a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York leads to a terrible misadventure for Heidi, and her initial reaction to hearing that Heidi went to a strange man's apartment is a bit harsh: “How could you have done that?” These six words set a disastrous course for the rest of both of their lives that culminates in a big, televised shebang several decades (and hundreds of pages) later and then a bunch of additional smaller shebangs as the book keeps refusing to end. Hung on the scaffolding of this silly plot is another sort of book entirely, a deep and dilatory character study of Agnes Vaughan, both her interior life (she is obsessed with the origins of words and the way we use language) and her biography (she quits teaching, moves to Italy, becomes an art restorer, has a child, has a grandchild, moves back to the U.S., all the while suffering continually for her supposed crime against Heidi). Major philosophical digressions abound—about the love of one’s work, about the love of one’s dog, about motherhood and marriage, about the persistence of “hatred and ugliness” in the world, and much more—and some of these are quite wonderful, but they end up feeling like ballast in the unwieldy mess that is this novel. Despite all Gordon's detailed fleshing-out of the ruminative Agnes, the villainous Heidi is completely nuance-free, with a backstory of Grimm Brothers–style grimness, hateable from the heels of her stilettos to the spiky tips of her hair, from her predilection for vicious lying to her enthusiasm for Ayn Rand. (As bad as she is, her mother is even worse!) And after all this, the ending—the long awaited payback—is unsatisfying, since the truth is never confronted and Agnes is never actually exonerated for her imaginary crime.
The marriage of shallow suspense plot and deep character study creates the wrong kind of page-turner.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-524-74922-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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