A boisterous, stylish novel about fathers, sons, and the messiness of American life.
In Casey’s debut novel, a powerful city council member and his offspring separately attempt to atone for past mistakes.
Dan Hurley is a seasoned Chicago pol, educated at the foot of Ed O’Brien, the city’s long-serving Irish mayor, and his powerful friends in government. As a member of the city council, Dan became notorious for his work on behalf of the Democratic political machine, but as he reaches the end of his career, a dispute over a warehouse arises between the new mayor and a Westside minister. The situation presents Dan with an opportunity to possibly undo some of the cynical maneuvers that characterized his time in office. Meanwhile, Dan’s estranged son, Billy, is living a life of frustrated potential above a tavern in a small Wisconsin town, where he rents canoes to tourists. As he prepares for a new custody trial—with an aim to get back the children he lost due to his drug and alcohol abuse—Dan’s sudden death allows Billy to reevaluate his father and perhaps help to change the man’s legacy. Over the course of the novel, Casey proves himself to be intimately familiar with the ins and outs of Chicago politics. The first chapter, narrated by Dan, offers a particularly wonderful warts-and-all portrait of lawmaking: “So I’m in my chair, front and center, ringmaster in the Council chambers, the mayor presides, his minions atwitter, my aldermanic brethren lounge around and about me, in cushy red chairs with the city seal, cameras, red lights on, along the wall.” The prose is similarly, and remarkably, energetic throughout the remainder of the work. However, the plot loses some steam after it becomes Billy’s own story, and a length of 500-plus pages seems unnecessary. Even so, the novel, which is set in the mid-1980s, feels very much like an engaging artifact of that era, and after discovering it, readers will look forward to whatever future projects Casey has up his sleeve.
A boisterous, stylish novel about fathers, sons, and the messiness of American life.Pub Date: July 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-09-835623-1
Page Count: 476
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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