If you love old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama, this may be just your cup of foxglove tea.
Can we ever live down our past mistakes? Does it depend on how many there are?
“QUEENS KILLER-CUTIE’S ATTEMPTED MURDER. BOYFRIEND’S DAD FED TOXIC TEA. REDHEAD CAUGHT RED-HANDED.” The tabloid scandals start early and never stop in Leavitt’s latest, with a Tilt-a-Whirl plot encompassing Endless Love–type teenage passion with a side of attempted murder, homegrown poison plants, a jailhouse pregnancy, a long-ago rape in Central Park, stalking, domestic violence, and a life destroyed when a character’s mother gets drunk and spills her secrets to a guy in a bar who turns out to be a journalist. (Wait, didn’t she see the fedora?) The story opens in upstate New York in April 2018, when Ella Levy is released from prison after having served only six years of the 25-year sentence she began at age 15. An investigative reporter has revealed both that her confession was forced and that the judge who sentenced her was taking kickbacks from the prison. But her conviction has not actually been overturned, and it’s not going to be easy to find work as a young convicted felon—good thing there’s a little newspaper in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that needs an advice columnist. The media certainly plays many roles in this story, which has a kind of naïve and fearless narrative energy that will be familiar to readers of Leavitt’s earlier novels, including With or Without You (2020) and Cruel Beautiful World (2016). Each of the troubled central characters—Ella; her mother, Helen; her old boyfriend, Jude Stein—gets a nice, vanilla love interest to withhold their secrets from...UNTIL IT’S ALMOST TOO LATE! One complaint: Doesn’t the horrible villain deserve a bit more comeuppance than they get?
If you love old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama, this may be just your cup of foxglove tea.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781643751283
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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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