A sometimes bleak but wholly absorbing coming-of-age story.
A girl overcomes a harsh upbringing and vows to make something of herself in Burgess’ series prequel.
Five-year-old Roxy Reid and her mother, Isadora, live in poverty in London’s East End. Isadora earns money as a sex worker but mostly uses it to feed her drug habit. She’s an angry woman who vents her frustrations by physically abusing her daughter. Roxy finds most of Isadora’s regulars to be seedy types, but Nick Dredd shows both Isadora and Roxy nothing but kindness. Nick ultimately takes Roxy in, giving her a better place to live, teaching her how to fight, and making her a part of his growing drug-dealing business. When she’s a bit older, she becomes a courier—both as a legitimate bike messenger and as a drug transporter. As a result, she’s often surrounded by reprehensible people, including Nick’s local rivals and Russian criminals muscling their way into Nick’s territory. Roxy ably holds her own but looks for an above-board career; she finally scores a job as an administrative assistant at a major American bank’s London office. Enter James Hancock, an American who’s just transferred there as head of fixed income trading; Roxy quickly sees him as her “meal ticket” out of the life she’s stuck in. But initiating a sexual relationship with him only complicates things, as James is married and most also likely sleeping with Roxy’s boss—who’s married as well. The longer she stays in London, the greater her chances of running into unsavory types from her recent past, whether they’re assorted criminals or simply men who remain irate that Roxy rejected their advances with her fists.
Burgess, whose last series entry was Roxy Reid: Five Weeks in New York(2021), excels at developing this prequel’s multilayered cast. Roxy has a complicated relationship with her abusive mother who repeatedly acknowledges her faults but seems incapable of rectifying her behavior. Nick is a mentor and warmhearted parental figure, which makes for a stark contrast with his criminal behavior, and although James may be the “protector” Roxy yearns for, he generally comes across as a pushover. The story’s pacing is impeccable, smoothly moving through the years until young Roxy reaches adulthood. Although it sticks to Roxy’s perspective, her ever-changing life propels her to different homes, various ways of making money, and into a host of other characters’ lives. With so many lawbreakers, it won’t surprise readers that this book has several dark and violent turns; fortunately, Burgess doesn’t steep the story in gloominess and only implies much of the violence, especially during Roxy’s earliest years. The protagonist as an adult is tough and ultra-chic, riding a motorcycle, sporting a leather messenger bag, and carrying her trusty switchblade and brass knuckles wherever she goes. In one scene, after a scuffle (that she wins), the author effectively describes her as wearing “her leather-Lycra fingerless gloves, and there was blood on them, though it was beginning to dry….Her knuckles were raw, with red, black, and blue bruising.” The ending perfectly sets up the next chronological installment.
A sometimes bleak but wholly absorbing coming-of-age story.Pub Date: July 31, 2023
ISBN: 979-8854434607
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
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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