Predictable in almost every way—but, surprisingly, no less enjoyable for it.
When, on instinct, Samuel Fiddes performs a heroic act, he sets in motion a passionate and tragic romance that will take him halfway around the world.
Glasgow in the late 1870s is a study in contrasts. There are wealthy families, like the MacIntyres, who employ dozens of servants to see to their comfort, and there are orphans like Samuel and his sister, Alison, who grew up in a Catholic orphanage until the nuns’ abuse got to be too much, and they ran away. When Samuel saves little Geordie MacIntyre from a runaway carriage, he and his sister are invited for dinner at the MacIntyres’ home, where he beholds Hailey, whom he has admired from afar at church. They begin a tentative romance, only to be ripped apart when the MacIntyres lose everything in a bank collapse and decide to emigrate to America—Washington Territory, to be exact—for the available mining work. Terrible journeys ensue, and hardship, and bitterness. Hailey marries a local miner to save her family from ruin just before Samuel arrives to find her, and the novel follows the next several years as they try to deny their passion, as Samuel becomes a successful shipbuilder, and as Hailey carries the burdens of a broken family. While Oliveira may not break genre conventions in any meaningful way, she writes with such conviction and sensory detail that one cannot help but be transported into the world of these characters, both primary and secondary, the roughness of the place, and its wild beauty. Overall, this novel is as easy to slip into as a favorite sweater; even the potentially unfamiliar setting is gorgeously rendered and always a surprise. The history of Seattle seems lesser known than many other cities of the era, and it adds a lovely note to the star-crossed love story.
Predictable in almost every way—but, surprisingly, no less enjoyable for it.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593543856
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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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