A well-researched and compelling homage to Cervantes’ Dulcinea.
A feminist reclamation of Don Quixote’s Dulcinea that explores what happens when the woman who inspired the character is able to confront the writer.
Dolça Llull Prat is the daughter of a wealthy merchant. She’s confident, enjoys reading and painting, and, as her father says, “her curiosity is matched only by her impetuosity, and both are as long as a sennight of ceaseless rain.” She is multidimensional, unlike Don Quixote’s Dulcinea. The book opens with the arrival of distant relative Miguel de Cerbantes de Cortinas at Dolça’s family home in Barcelona. Upon meeting, Dolça and Miguel are immediately attracted to one another, and they begin a secret romance. Dolça prefers to read and speak in Catalan, so she calls him Miquel, because, she says, “that’s what it is in my tongue.” The plot and setting are firmly anchored with excellent historical details, and author Veciana-Suarez takes particular care to ensure the prominent languages in Spain at the time are well represented. Miquel the “poet-soldier” is not a man of Dolça’s status, so her parents disapprove of him—but this doesn’t dissuade Dolça. Miquel visits and writes often, until he abruptly stops. In his absence, Dolça’s parents arrange a marriage to Françesc d’Oms Calders, who they feel can provide the life to which she’s accustomed. Before the wedding takes place, however, Dolça receives news that Miquel was taken hostage, which explains his disappearance. She feels conflicted but goes ahead with the marriage anyway. When Miquel is released, they continue their affair despite the fact that she’s married. Years later, Miquel, who writes under the name Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, publishes El Quixote, which includes a character named Dulcinea. The character’s description is unflattering, and the closeness to her name causes rumors about his and Dolça’s relationship to flourish. Dolça feels betrayed. Dulcinea, “the hidalgo’s muse,” inspires everything the title character does, which Miquel feels is a compliment. Chapters alternate between Dolça's page-turning memories in the late 1500s, following her romance with Miquel and their falling-out, with more slowly moving chapters set in the early 1600s as she travels to see him one last time.
A well-researched and compelling homage to Cervantes’ Dulcinea.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9798200813414
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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