An illuminating, if sometimes wordy, exploration of recent history and the people who lived through it.
Desai’s novel explores varied perspectives on life during the Covid-19 pandemic.
It is the summer of 2020. Twelve Americans arrive at a mansion in the Hamptons. Everyone has been in lockdown for months due to Covid-19, but now they are free to interact with others. The plan is for “two weeks of eating, activities, and dating in a secure environment,” though the main draw will be storytelling. The guests come from different political, economic, and racial backgrounds, and each is to tell a story to the others about the impact of Covid-19. The group has been assembled by a wealthy man named Olive Mixer. (While the scenario may seem like the premise of a reality TV show, Mixer insists that the goings-on are not being recorded.) In this first installment of a series, six of the participants have their turns to say their pieces. These range from a nurse named Andrea who talks about “how ordinary people who work essential jobs stood up to this horrendous virus” to a part-time handyman named Ricard who doesn’t quite trust Freemasons. In between the stories there is socializing, games, and even a shark attack (not to mention large and varied meals). Food is mentioned quite a lot throughout the book—one character tells of a dinner in Montana that included “trout, pinto bean, and ham soup with fry bread, chillicothe, sirloin mutton” as well as “a dessert called kuchen, a cross between cake and pie filled with, in this case, flathead cherries.” Details like these culinary lists do not exactly leap from the page; what proves to be more impactful are the reflections of the guests, which do indeed run a gamut. Ricard, for instance, offends just about everyone present with his story, causing most to sit in “silent disdain” as they listen to him speak. The fictional characters’ sentiments are carefully crafted, offering an intriguing range of realistic reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic.
An illuminating, if sometimes wordy, exploration of recent history and the people who lived through it.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781734727821
Page Count: 467
Publisher: The New Wei LLC
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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