Vivid scenes from America’s forgotten pandemic.
Against the backdrop of the 1918 influenza epidemic, two sisters offer refuge to an abused child.
Dallas’ first-person narrator is 24-year-old Lutie, short for Lucretia, a fashion illustrator for a downtown department store that caters to Denver’s upper class. Lutie lives with her older sister, Helen, who, as a nurse, is dealing firsthand with the misery attending the epidemic. As the novel begins, Lutie, among a small, fearful throng, witnesses the death throes of a soldier on a public street. This is only one instance of Dallas’ graphic depictions of the course of the influenza pandemic in one city, many of which resonate today—although not necessarily the “death wagons” patrolling the streets or the widespread acceptance of public health measures. Lutie arrives home to find Ronald Streeter, the sisters’ downstairs tenant, stabbed to death in the kitchen, Helen standing over him with an ice pick in hand as his 10-year-old daughter, Dorothy, cowers nearby. We soon learn that drunken, depraved Streeter abused his wife, Maud, and had raped Dorothy, also offering her to his crony, Maud’s equally depraved brother. Helen’s fiance, Gil, a medical student also overworked during the pestilence, helps remove the body to a vacant lot, hoping one of the “wagons” will dispose of it along with the anonymous remains of flu victims. As the sisters make a home for the traumatized Dorothy after Maud dies of flu, complications pile up. Long-suppressed secrets emerge as the uncle tries to interfere with the sisters’ adoption case. The parents of Peter, Lutie’s fiance, who is killed in the war, offer staunch help. Dallas makes a worthy effort to use the parlance of the day, erring on the side of formal, somewhat stilted speech on the parts of all but the guttersnipe characters. Aside from these obvious villains, the characters are well intentioned and unfailingly kind, including two hard-boiled detectives. The novel is seeded throughout with tragedy, but the overriding message is hope, and the overarching adversary is not human but a virus.
Vivid scenes from America’s forgotten pandemic.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2502-7788-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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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