A haunting story about familial catastrophe.
A fatal car accident pits two families against each other and compels both to confront their unresolved emotional issues in Poole’s novel.
Kyle Beasley is an 18-year-old high-school senior with a promising future before him—a spectacular athlete, he has secured a full scholarship to college to play Division One baseball. However, his bright prospects are thrown into doubt by a tragic accident—while driving, he strikes and kills Amy Shawver, the mother of Ethan, one of his schoolmates. In a fit of panic, Kyle flees the scene, but he is quickly arrested and charged with vehicular homicide, a crime for which he could serve considerable prison time. In the aftermath of the accident, the two affected families become adversaries, “kind of like the Hatfields and the McCoys,” and the tension between them spills over into the town at large, now riven by competing loyalties. In this psychologically subtle novel, the crisis pushes both families to wrestle with their own dysfunctions—Ethan’s relationship with his father is fraught with conflict, and he discovers that his mother was once a reckless alcoholic. Meanwhile, Kyle’s parents, Caroline and Jordan, try to repair a marriage left battered after her bout with breast cancer. The portrayal of the accident’s ramifications crackles with emotional power; Poole’s depiction of the split within the Beasley family—between the terror of the prospect of prison time for Kyle and an aching sympathy for the Shawvers—is drawn with artful nuance. One could quibble that the book’s conclusion is too neatly settled, but it never descends into cheap sentimentality. The tale is a rarity in contemporary literature: a novel that revolves around a moral predicament and resists the temptation to issue didactic lessons and simplistic bromides. Here, the author delicately combines terrible loss and a moving hopefulness into one seamless and plausible story.
A haunting story about familial catastrophe.Pub Date: July 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781509260515
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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
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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