A funny, immersive portrait of an unusual working relationship.
A teenager becomes the scribe of a former fashion icon in this debut literary novel.
Self-conscious 17-year-old Bradley McCreedy responds to an unusual job posting hung in the window of a newsagent’s shop in London: “Wanted!!! Urgent!!! Refined, respectable lady authoress seeks domestic assistant of same ilk. Usual rates.” When he calls the number, the daughter of his potential boss warns him he’ll be working for a dotty older woman, but that’s only the half of it. Eloise Slaughter lives in a stately but filthy mansion, as attentive to her wardrobe and makeup as she is inattentive to the dishes piled up everywhere. She hires Bradley not only to help straighten the place up—something the slightly OCD teen is glad to do—but also to help her with her memoirs. To hear Eloise tell it, she was the high priestess of London fashion in the 1960s and ’70s. Bradley thinks she’s off her rocker, but he takes the job, in part because Eloise doesn’t comment on the massive birthmark on his forehead. She’s certainly a dotty older woman—complete with a locked room he isn’t allowed to go into—but it turns out she isn’t lying about her past. At least not entirely. An unlikely friendship emerges, one that will pay dividends for both parties—at least so long as Bradley doesn’t overreach and bring the whole thing crashing down. Clark is a remarkable ventriloquist, alternating from the working-class vernacular of Bradley to the posh theatricality of Eloise with each chapter. Here, Bradley, who eventually moves into the mansion full time, comments on Eloise’s nocturnal activities: “She prowls at night. I hear her tip-tapping up and down the hallway. Mostly I reckon she gets up to fiddle with her puzzles—loves her jigsaws, Miss E—but sometimes she trots down the corridor in my direction. First time she done that, it got my heart pumping, I can tell you. Lying there, thinking, What if she comes in here and starts acting all weird an’ that?” The characters are richly drawn, and readers will quickly become invested in the odd couple, as individuals and as friends. The story is a pleasure all the way through.
A funny, immersive portrait of an unusual working relationship.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-78-965093-8
Page Count: 291
Publisher: Unbound
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”
A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.
Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!
Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780316258876
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
