A gripping tale of a troubled artist and her forced homecoming, replete with American pathos.
In Naremore’s novel, a talented photographer must confront her painful personal history when she returns to the town where she went to high school.
Readers meet the curiously-named Skade Felsdottir (rhymes with “shade,” she tells a police officer) as she is crisscrossing America’s highways in her ancient Jeep Wagoneer. Skade’s apparent destitution is confusing, at first, as she is a highly sought-after photographer—so much so, in fact, that she has recently won the Klausterman Prize, an honor that carries the additional benefit of a fairly lucrative book deal with the venerable Chancery publishing house. But as readers spend just a few pages with Skade, they come to suspect what may be holding her back: Never more than a few minutes pass by without her reaching for a vodka bottle. She drinks everywhere she can, and even a few places she can’t, like behind the wheel of that beaten-up Wagoneer, which she has been living out of. With a scant month left before her deadline to turn in her final manuscript including all of her photos and narrative descriptions, Skade is lightyears behind where she needs to be, and the only way she can think to wrangle more time from her publisher is to photograph a set of ceremonial totem poles they’re interested in. This normally wouldn’t be so bad, but these totem poles are located in Carleton, the small town outside of Chicago where Skade attended high school. As she returns to her old haunts, readers come to understand that her drinking may have taken root here after a horrible (and especially bloody) accident on the road that she yearns to forget. Skade reconnects with an old boyfriend (though she knows better) and meets Kit, a young woman whose own trajectory shares striking commonalities with Skade’s troubled past.
Naremore’s novel tells, in some ways, a familiar story: A struggling protagonist returns to her hometown, where she is forced to settle with the demons of her past. But the author’s keen powers of description make the novel feel fresh: “She was a needle pulling stitches across a gas station road atlas of America… Her sutures ran roughly along the line where the names began to change from things like Manatoc and Muskeegum and Oswego and Kankakee—to Fortville and Columbus and English and Whitestown”. Such sweeping, gripping descriptions of the American landscape are pleasingly commonplace here, and, together with the descansos that Skade photographs, they establish a noir-ish, pastoral flavor to Naremore’s setting that feels both new and authentic. Skade is a character who readers haven’t met before and will want to spend time with, her troubling alcoholism aside—one can’t help but be taken with a woman who, hungover to the gills and without a clean swimsuit, simply decides to hop the fence of the closed motel pool and swim in her underwear amongst the floating husks of junebugs and the buzzing of hungry mosquitoes. Readers, too, will put up with any small nuisances to stick with Naremore’s seductive narrative.
A gripping tale of a troubled artist and her forced homecoming, replete with American pathos.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781646035052
Page Count: 241
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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