The magic is missing in this intense yet less-well-consolidated return trip.
Hemmed in by long-kept silences and problematic histories, a complicated family in 18th-century Amsterdam struggles to find its future.
Burton’s sequel to her bestselling debut, The Miniaturist (2014), picks up a generation later, in 1705, in a world riddled with secrets. Nella Brandt, the challenged wife of the previous book, now returns as aunt to 18-year-old Thea, the illegitimate daughter of her sister-in-law Marin and Otto, the African manservant who worked for Nella’s late husband. As the story opens, Thea, conducting a forbidden love affair with a scene painter at the Schouwburg Theatre, still yearns to understand the circumstances of her secret conception and to know more about the mother who died giving birth to her. Moreover, what are the details of Otto’s background in Surinam and Nella’s choice never to return to her now-derelict family home, Assendelft? The Brandts are also keeping secret from society at large the fact that they have no savings left and that Otto has lost his job. And there’s one more family enigma that may have resurfaced, as perfect, small, doll-like crafted objects start appearing on their doorstep. Has the strangely prescient miniaturist who haunted Nella’s marriage returned? Despite this welter of intrigues, there’s a static feel to the novel’s first half, scarcely alleviated by the introduction of Jacob van Loos, a wealthy possible suitor for Thea who might be the solution to the family’s financial distress. While two dramatic turning points eventually jolt the narrative forward, the story’s plotting is limited and its mood dominated by introspection, reminiscence, and unhappiness. Among a cast of isolated characters, it falls to Nella to act as the lynchpin once again, enabling a resolution which arrives sweetly but without answers to many of the preceding questions.
The magic is missing in this intense yet less-well-consolidated return trip.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63557-974-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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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