An open-ended conclusion leaves the door ajar for more mystery and romance.
Dodd’s series launch turns a Shakespearean tragedy into a rom-com mystery.
“My name is Rosie, Rosaline if I’m in trouble, and I’m the daughter of Romeo and Juliet.” In Dodd’s entertaining retelling of Shakespeare's play, the tragic lovers survived their suicide attempts to marry and produce seven spirited children, headed by practical, level-headed Rosie. Despite the best efforts of her parents to marry off their eldest daughter, the clever Rosie has successfully fended off her potential suitors with a little matchmaking involving two younger sisters. Now almost 20, she’s content to remain a spinster and manage the Montague household, but alas her father receives a proposal he cannot turn down from the loathsome Duke Leir Stephano of the house of Creppa. Despite Rosie’s objections that the duke just buried his third wife, a betrothal ball is quickly organized. There the reluctant bride-to-be meet-cutes with an uninvited guest, the dazzlingly handsome Lysander, and stumbles upon the body of Duke Stephano with a dagger plunged into his chest. Suspicion falls on Rosie, even though Escalus, the brooding Prince of Verona, tries to protect her, and she must identify the killer before she becomes a victim. Dodd peppers her novel with plenty of Shakespearean references, making this more fan fiction than a true historical. The deliberate anachronisms (“I smiled a Mona Lisa smile”) will drive purists crazy, but most readers won't care. Dodd’s Verona is a mythical, timeless city where a spunky, independent young woman can enchant two different men. There is some YA appeal in Rosie’s character that will remind some readers of Karen Cushman’s Catherine, Called Birdy, but one of the protagonists takes an unbelievable 180-degree dark turn that will disappoint readers.
An open-ended conclusion leaves the door ajar for more mystery and romance.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781496750167
Page Count: 304
Publisher: John Scognamiglio Books/Kensington
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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