A fun time-travel novel for an extremely specific audience.
A musical theater superfan follows his heroes through time in Cole’s novel.
In Brooklyn, 1983, 25-year-old Michael Marvin Minkus—Mikey for short—loves one person more than anyone on earth: Ethel Merman. He lives with his widowed mother, Rifka, in a small apartment where, perpetually in-between jobs, he pores over his collection of records, posters, and clippings related to his idol. To his horror, he reads news in the tabloids of Ethel Merman’s inoperable brain tumor. Despite the odds, Mikey manages to sneak his way into Ethel’s apartment—and arrives there while another Broadway legend, Mary Martin, happens to be visiting her old rival for the first time in a year. As if that weren’t fantastic enough, Mikey takes the opportunity to snoop around in Ethel’s closet…and ends up, in Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe style, transported back to the dressing room of the Imperial Theatre in 1939. There he meets Ethel and Mary while they are young and on the cusp of stardom. Through a series of similarly magical leaps, Mikey follows the two through the rest of their careers, appearing always at moments when the two frenemies cross paths. Is this the ultimate dream come true for the ultimate fan? Or will Mikey learn why it’s usually better not to meet your heroes? Cole’s rapturous prose succeeds in capturing Mikey’s fanboy ecstasy at getting to witness so many significant moments from musical history: “Mikey’s head almost spun off of his neck in pleasure. He was there when South Pacific was being conceived! He might have even helped decide its fate by suggesting Dick and Oscar as the authors. Oh, how he hoped he would be around for the birth, too.” The book seems made for readers who, like Mikey, can’t get enough of Merman and Martin. There’s plenty of Ethel and Mary, though not a ton of plot, and readers who aren’t so steeped in Broadway lore may find themselves somewhat bored.
A fun time-travel novel for an extremely specific audience.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798985934458
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Moreclacke Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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