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
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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