If this story held any promise as a screenplay, it did not translate to this novelization.
In Riddle’s novel, adapted from his own screenplay, a group of free-spirited friends struggles with careers and relationship choices in Los Angeles.
Thirty-one-year-old Robert Oreo runs Nordstrom’s fragrance counter at The Grove shopping mall. Classy, charming, and invariably upbeat, Robert cruises through life without much concern: “Sometimes I kiss girls, sometimes I kiss guys, and sometimes I kiss a lot of both.” Robert is forced to confront the darker side of life when his favorite client’s grandson unexpectedly dies. Robert finds himself spending more and more time with wealthy, grieving socialite Margaret, much to the dismay of his young lover, Michael, who keeps waiting for Robert to commit to a relationship. The relationships between the characters resemble quick sketches, making it hard to see where the story is going. Halfway through the book, without warning, the narrative seems to give up on Robert as its protagonist and instead begins to follow the lives of his coworkers and friends. These chapters alternate between Byron, who finds unexpected success in the adult film industry; Greta, whose previous heartbreak makes her too suspicious to enter a new relationship; and Miranda, a transgender bookstore employee who receives a sudden career opportunity. While the ups and downs of Robert and his entourage are engaging and occasionally hilarious (in one of the scenes, Byron is offered a job as a model for a new sex toy), the characters themselves remain flat, their motivations rarely clear or consistent. Robert’s peculiar, intense relationship with Margaret has the most dramatic promise, but it fizzles out without revealing anything about Robert’s more complex emotional mechanisms or connecting back to his professional life. Readers hoping to be transported by the setting or the romance will find the prose uneven and so overrun with italics and exclamation points that the text begins to resemble the ramblings of a hyperactive child (“He took the liberty and placed [the hat] on Robert’s head, and sure enough, it was the perfect fit!”).
If this story held any promise as a screenplay, it did not translate to this novelization.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798393865078
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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