A charming and often touching novel of self-discovery.
A skittish Midwestern gay man comes out with the help of a Washington, D.C.–based drag performer in Myer’s comic debut novel.
Randy Larson was born in 1986 and spent the first 32 years of his life in North Dakota, attempting to conceal the fact that he was gay from his small-town Lutheran neighbors. After his elderly parents die, one after the other, he decides to honor his mother’s last wish for Randy to move to a place where he can be himself and live a little. After weighing the pros and cons of various cities, he chooses the nation’s capital, as it’s big, but not too big, and, most importantly, not too cold. The move goes easier than expected: He quickly finds a job at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and a serviceable, if overpriced, one-bedroom apartment. Gaining entrance into the city’s gay community isn’t so simple, however, and Randy isn’t sure how to begin. Luckily, he stumbles into a gay bar one night while looking for a steakhouse, and there he meets a towering drag performer and Jayne Mansfield impersonator whom Randy comes to think of as his “fairy godmother.” Jayne is his opposite in nearly every way, and her regimen for Randy’s rebirth may be too much, and too fast, for him. Can Jayne successfully take the North Dakota out of the boy, or is the boy about to run screaming back to his hometown? Myer’s engaging prose effectively captures Randy’s playful insecurity, as when he panics during the opening moments of his first-ever date with a man: “While my brain proceeds with its usual work to undermine confidence, my feet have continued forward. At 7:31, I’m standing at the entrance to Lauriol Plaza. Derek, waiting at the host desk, breaks into a warm smile. At least he recognizes me, so that’s a plus.” Not all the jokes land, but overall, the book is a fun and generally entertaining read about overcoming insecurities and learning to be oneself. It’s also an affecting ode to unexpected friendships and finding communities that one never realized one needed.
A charming and often touching novel of self-discovery.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2023
ISBN: 978-1639887675
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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