An entertaining set of vignettes chronicling an endearing, close-knit community.
Clarke’s short story collection details characters and communities surrounding a river in the northeastern U.S.
Black River, running through the Adirondack Mountains, is a place the author knows well—Clarke’s grandfather founded the Dade’s Inn motel in the region in the 1930s, and his father and mother took over the business in the late 1950s and ran it until the early 1960s. The author’s focus on community is conveyed through 31 loosely connected short stories, based on his father’s tales of the “rugged backwoods” in the Black River area, all united by people who are a “robust group with character.” The stories celebrate both the remarkable and the mundane, including a bar fight begun by a Dade’s Inn regular called Harold (“Harold”), the terrifying appearance of a bear behind the Inn (“The Bear”), and an examination of local Christmas traditions (“The Magic of Christmas”). Clarke’s ability to evoke the transcendent qualities in ordinary moments is a hallmark of the collection; one of the standout stories is devoted to Clarke’s memories of churning homemade blackberry ice cream with his grandpa Dade, told so sweetly that the reader can almost taste the frozen treat: “The finest gift we can give to one another is our time.” Human connection is a central thread throughout, and descriptions of the locale affirm Clarke’s strong sense of place. His prose is simultaneously immersive and matter-of-fact (“Trying to distinguish the facts is like taking a stroll in the Hundred Acre Wood. The stories have taken on a life of their own”), drawing some of the more disparate stories together as the author jumps between people and time periods, from the Second World War to contemporary exchanges between a husband and wife. Clarke’s stories celebrate this unique area and those living in it, immortalizing the comical, the quotidian, and the extraordinary in equal measure.
An entertaining set of vignettes chronicling an endearing, close-knit community.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781737301745
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CCE Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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