Though the tension sometimes slackens, the novel features a memorable, multifaceted protagonist.
Gist’s character-driven novel explores a woman’s lingering relationship from the past.
It’s 1986 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when 13-year-old Hazel Walczak first meets Teddy Spencer after putting together a summer reading list. Teddy is dating Hazel’s older sister, Isabel, and he’s clearly trouble from the start, with his Playboy bunny lighter and devil-may-care attitude. He is also 18. Hazel, in her stirrup pants and Garfield shirt, is intrigued by this rebel. In time, Teddy and Isabel break up. A few years later, after Teddy and Hazel share an awkward sexual experience together, they begin dating in secret. When Teddy decides to go to Europe for a while, Hazel is left wondering what she was doing with him to begin with; she’s just wasted an entire youthful summer on this slacker, who, years later in therapy, she will identify as a manipulative narcissist. Back in the 1980s, Hazel carries on with her life, making some friends in high school and finding her true calling in baking. Even with Teddy gone, Hazel is not immune to his influence—his postcards from abroad don’t exactly inspire calm in her aching teenage heart. Hazel’s life is further complicated by her alcoholic mother, who always seems keen on stirring up trouble. Years later, in the early 2000s, Hazel lives in Chicago, running a catering business with her sister. She’s married to an even-keeled accountant and is raising two lovely children; all is essentially well in Hazel’s world. But when she journeys back to Michigan to comfort a friend, who should she run into? It’s a snowy evening, and Teddy is eager to reconnect.
The author paints a vivid picture of Hazel. Her changes over the years follow a compelling progression as she goes from innocent youngster to moody teenager to settled professional. And just when the narrative gets comfortable with Hazel’s happy life in Chicago, events take a surreal turn; readers will come to question just what is happening to this poor woman. Yet some portions of Hazel’s life stretch out without offering much dramatic satisfaction—for instance, she meets her essentially perfect husband, Phil, when her company does the catering for his family’s company Christmas party in a lengthy, largely uneventful scene, followed by a less lengthy though equally uneventful courtship. Hazel describes her relationship with Phil by saying “I was safe and loved, and it was pure and real.” She describes her honeymoon visit to Paris with the observation that the city is “romantic, breathtaking.” Such terms don’t reveal much beyond the obvious. The story’s excitement comes from the two principal antagonists: Teddy, and Hazel’s mother, Joanne. The story is propelled by the question of what, if any, destruction Hazel’s chance encounter with Teddy will bring, and what manner of chaos Joanne will introduce into Hazel’s adult life. When Teddy is offering to go out for a drink or Joanne is banning someone from Hazel’s wedding, the tension runs high—when the story veers from their machinations, the conflict evaporates. Still, as readers come to know Hazel throughout the chapters, they’re likely to remain curious about her fate.
Though the tension sometimes slackens, the novel features a memorable, multifaceted protagonist.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9798987867013
Page Count: 328
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2023
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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