A captivating page-turner that raises more questions than it answers.
An estranged father and daughter try to reconnect 25 years after she mysteriously disappeared for a week while they were camping in Mount Rainier National Park.
The heart of Rock’s latest novel is the relationship between 76-year-old Benjamin Hanson and his 36-year-old daughter, Helen. When Helen was 11, she went missing for a week under mysterious circumstances while she and Benjamin were camping in the woods near Mount Rainier. Attempting to reconnect, Helen visits Benjamin at his Portland, Oregon, home. She either can’t or won’t talk to her father in person about her disappearance. Instead, she installs a machine with custom software that records him as he’s speaking, transcribes his words, and delivers them for her to process at her own pace. She responds by fax or phone. The incident and subsequent time apart have left them both unable to articulate details or emotions to one another. While Helen can’t even bring herself to speak of the camping trip, Benjamin suggests that they go camping again, and in his preparations for this ill-suggested outing, he encounters Melissa, a transient woman with questionable motivations. Something’s off about Melissa, and her actions waver between altruistic and opportunistic, but as she learns of the history between Benjamin and Helen, she becomes a willing substitute in Benjamin’s would-be plans to re-create whatever it was that happened to him and his daughter 25 years ago. As the novel progresses it becomes clear that it’s never been about the reconciliation of Benjamin and Helen but rather the ongoing relationships both they and Melissa have with death, the deaths of loved ones closest to them, and the search for answers in trying to deal with their losses. Its best elements, like its supernatural overtures, are reminiscent of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).
A captivating page-turner that raises more questions than it answers.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-641-29343-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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