A bittersweet exploration of family, nicely balanced between hangdog humor and plangent emotion.
A lawyer stuck in a rut receives some crotchety holiday cheer from a mysterious old couple in Florio’s charming Christmas story.
At the age of 45, with gray hairs and a spare tire growing apace, John Persepio makes a mediocre living filing wrongful termination lawsuits against superstore chain U-Sav-Plentee. But he still has a heart; on his way to court, he stops to help a shriveled old man whose ancient Chevy Impala has suffered a flat tire, weathering acerbic jibes in the process. (“Not much of a car for a lawyer,” the man notes of John’s threadbare Subaru.) The incident touches off a series of weird occurrences, including odd time distortions, a vomiting spell that scotches his closing argument in a big case, and more encounters with the old man and his equally gnomic wife in stores, parking lots, and at a Christmas party. The couple subject him to amusing but enigmatic conversations while insisting that they are on their way home (where that may be is never specified). Meanwhile, John wrestles with his fraying marriage to his perpetually aggrieved wife Linda and his distant relationships with his teenage sons Joseph and Mark, whose faces are permanently buried in their phones and video games; his warm rapport with his sweet 5-year-old daughter Macy is the brightest spot in his life. Adding to his gloom are his guilty ruminations about his parents, who died young in their 50s, and his brother Michael, who committed suicide. John’s funk is sometimes relieved and sometimes deepened by the hectic run-up to Christmas: An excursion to a Christmas tree lot for a memorably crooked tree allows him to bond with the kids, a slapstick disaster that devastates both a ham and the tree heightens tensions, and a Midnight Mass proves surprisingly soothing. But at another meeting early on Christmas Day, the old couple bring up ominous prospects confronting John: divorce, a possible brain tumor, and maybe worse.
Florio’s yarn is a richly textured portrait of a middle-class clan with sharply etched characters and a touch of magical realism, written in evocative prose that’s wryly funny but has darker undertones of uncertainty, gathering estrangement, and loss. The author has a sharp eye for family dynamics, whether in the studied boredom of adolescents (“the boys seemed to be intrigued by the sight of the trees, even though they tried to stifle any sign that perhaps they were on the verge of possibly enjoying themselves”) or the explosive antagonism between resentful spouses (“‘you had plenty of chances to tell me not to do this tonight. I asked you fifty times. You said, every single time, it’s fine. Go ahead. It’s fine’”). Through subtle observations of everyday life, Florio crafts a resonant message about the purpose of parenthood, as when John watches the kids manage the tree without him: “In a weird sort of way, it showed they’d be OK without me, without parents, with nothing other than their own motivations and aspirations and above all else each other. I felt at once relieved and fulfilled and entirely irrelevant.” By turns comic, ruminative and heartfelt, Florio’s tale captures the deep emotional currents flowing through a not-quite-typical Christmas.
A bittersweet exploration of family, nicely balanced between hangdog humor and plangent emotion.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798987944035
Page Count: 268
Publisher: PFT Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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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