An engaging tale of a middle-class woman’s attempt to achieve the American dream.
In this novel about a Jewish American family, a multigenerational history unfolds through the eyes of an immigrant who follows her husband to his home in New York state.
When Ada Kessler arrives in the United States from Scotland in 1937, she is determined to start a new and gracious life with Douglas, her doctor husband and “knight in shining armor.” Her resolve is dampened when she realizes that the newlyweds will not immediately have the grand home she imagined but will live with Douglas’ family in its crowded, slightly run-down home, where she is expected to share a room with her 9-year-old sister-in-law, Lillian. With her ambitions of refinement offended by the loud brashness of the Kessler family, especially Douglas’ mother, Clara, Ada holds herself carefully apart as she plots to create the sophisticated life of her dreams. The one exception in Douglas’ big brood of noisy relations appears to be his father, Max, a charming and dapper man who courts Ada’s favor in secret, then turns dangerous when she sets limits on their relationship. As Ada matures and Douglas’ medical career advances, she attains the cultivated life she once aspired to but seems unable to relax and enjoy its fruits. She finds her twin girls, Margaret and Melissa, an irritation rather than a joy, as she raises them on the rigid schedule deemed correct for the modern mother of the ’40s. Ada later has a third daughter, Phoebe. Decades pass, and Ada finds herself more and more on the outside of her children’s lives as they grow and start their own journeys. It is not until Clara dies and long-buried secrets are revealed that Ada begins to understand what it means to be a Kessler woman. King’s absorbing narrative spans six decades and introduces several memorable characters, such as the kindly matriarch Clara, who is wiser than anyone realizes, and Anshel, the gentle Holocaust survivor who marries Lillian. But Ada comes across too often as a stereotypical selfish woman, making her an unsympathetic protagonist. While she has one or two epiphanies, she remains basically unchanged through the book’s trajectory. Nonetheless, the enjoyable story does a good job of presenting an individual Jewish family’s identity and experiences without othering, categorizing, or giving excessive explanations.
An engaging tale of a middle-class woman’s attempt to achieve the American dream.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64388-462-2
Page Count: 281
Publisher: Luminare Press
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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