An absorbing, sensitive meld of fiction and history.
A debut novel sees a teenage girl step inside a famous painting and confront the sexual predation that lies hidden beneath its composition.
Fourteen-year-old Victoria lives in Boston in 1963. Her only real friend, Pam, has recently moved away, and Victoria is feeling isolated. The situation is not helped by her overprotective mother or by Victoria’s having to wear a back brace to combat her scoliosis. Victoria’s life takes an unexpected turn one Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts. First, she meets Hillary, a girl her own age with three brothers and two sisters. Victoria and Hillary will become good friends, but only if Victoria comes through the second notable event of the day: being pulled into The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, an unsettling painting by John Singer Sargent. One moment, Victoria is staring at the painting, the next she finds herself in Paris in 1882. Sargent is working on his composition while its subjects, four young sisters, pose. Victoria discovers she can interact with the two youngest girls, Mary Louisa and Julia. If anyone else notices her, though, she is returned to 1963. Victoria makes several more trips into the painting, in part because she is an only child and Mary Louisa and Julia feel like adopted sisters, in part because she detects a disturbing sexual undercurrent to the girls’ lives. Sargent seems a kindly man. But what of Clifford Graham, the young photographer with whom the two older girls are enamored? Can Victoria uncover the truth and prevent an act whose ramifications stretch as far as 1963? Loyster writes in the third person, past tense, employing naturalistic dialogue and a simple but engaging prose style. Victoria is both likable and believable as a teenager of the early ’60s. Hillary and the Boit girls are similarly convincing, while the author’s adult characters ground the portrayal with quiet realism. The story itself moves along at a good pace. Loyster treats a delicate subject with care and, uncommonly for historical novels, allows neither fact nor fiction to dominate. Readers unfamiliar with Sargent’s painting will think the backdrop richly imaginative. Those who know the artist will find the plot skillfully woven around what can be pieced together of the historical record.
An absorbing, sensitive meld of fiction and history.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64-742165-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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