Cravens shakes the dust off tired tropes and delivers a shining example of what an old-fashioned page-turner can accomplish.
Let’s reexamine the lives of women in the Wild West, shall we?
Bridget Shaughnessy—the extraordinary, soon-to-be-orphaned narrator of Cravens’ welcome remix of a Western novel—is 16, uneducated, and impoverished when her feckless father dies after a rattlesnake bite on the trail they’re taking together from Arkansas to Kansas (and a “fresh start”). Relying on intuition and one remaining mule, Bridget crosses the plains alone and winds up in Dodge City, where her story parts ways with most cowboy novels of the past. Bridget’s bright red hair attracts the attention of one of the proprietors of the Buffalo Queen Saloon, an establishment devoted to fulfilling the drinking, gambling, and carnal needs of cowboys and others living and passing through the frontier city. As Bridget embarks on a career as a “sporting woman” in the rough and tumble male world of the emerging West, she receives a belated education not just in the nature of sex work, but also in her own sexuality. When she’s drawn to a couple of the women she encounters at the Buffalo Queen, most notably the enigmatic gunslinger Spartan Lee, Bridget’s assertion of her own needs results in unforeseen consequences for herself and the rest of the saloon’s coterie. Cravens’ debut novel features a singular narrator in Bridget, whose matter-of-fact approach to sex work is shaken by her growing awareness of, and desire for, actual—not transactional—intimacy. The world of the Buffalo Queen and its employees is vividly drawn, and there's a cinematic quality all the way through Bridget’s life, from the possum stew she cooks over a wood fire to the red of her hair and the scarlet dress that is her work uniform.
Cravens shakes the dust off tired tropes and delivers a shining example of what an old-fashioned page-turner can accomplish.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780593498248
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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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