A quick read that offers a fun, modern update on the lives of a royal family many know and love.
In the 12th installment of the Princess Diaries series, Cabot brings readers back to Genovia in the year 2020 as Princess Mia navigates her hardest, wackiest challenges yet.
It’s March 2020, and for Princess Mia Thermopolis, it’s not all sunshine and pears in the royal palace. Not only has she just been informed by the prime minister that there is a worldwide pandemic, but her own grandmother has just been seen partying on a yacht with several fratty spring breakers from America. Within days, Mia issues a quarantine for the residents of Genovia, closing their small country’s borders…much to the dismay of her bar-owning Cousin Ivan and a family of bakers conveniently named the Paninis. When Mia’s husband, Michael, is exposed to the virus and ordered to self-isolate, Mia resorts to day-drinking and sweatpants-wearing, all in an attempt to remain sane with the entire Thermopolis family under one roof. Over the course of early quarantine, the number of palace inhabitants begins to resemble a small country, including Mia’s best friend, Lilly; ex-frenemy Lana and her Beyoncé-ified kids, Purple Iris and Sir Jason Junior; and her “InFLUENZer” Grandmère’s new American friends, Chad and Derek. While Mia works to maintain a semblance of normalcy within Genovia, conditions begin to escalate for the worse. Ivan sues her for disrupting the sale of booze, her other cousin Prince René stages anti-mask protests outside the castle walls, Michael is creating a vaccine with his high school ex-girlfriend, and Grandmère declares that she and Derek are engaged to be married. Can Mia protect her country from a deadly virus amid family lawsuits, purchases of 5,000 wedding napkins, and one ancient, pool-drinking cat named Fat Louie? Cabot’s beloved princess has grown into a strong, resilient leader, though her pandemic problems are perhaps relatively mild compared to those of real European countries. Regardless, Mia’s quirky and honest diary entries are a welcome take on subject matter readers know all too well.
A quick read that offers a fun, modern update on the lives of a royal family many know and love.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780063291935
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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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