An exceptional sequel that will leave readers eager for more.
Following the events of Black Girls Must Die Exhausted (2018), Tabitha Walker courageously navigates a risky pregnancy, an old flame, and workplace racism in Allen’s delightful sequel.
After the death of her beloved Granny Tab less than a year ago, Tabitha refuses to waste any more time on starting a family. Last year’s medical diagnosis of premature ovarian reserve failure encouraged Tab to do in vitro fertilization with a sperm donor, and she's just received the life-changing news: She’s having a son. Tab plans to raise the child alone as a “single mother by choice, much to the dismay of her ex-boyfriend Marc. Although they’ve been friends-with-benefits for the past few months, she hopes he will join the village (including her friends Alexis and Laila; unconventional doula Andouele; and Granny Tab's best friend, Ms. Gretchen, who's going to be the “glam-maw”) that it will take to help raise her baby. But then her doctor unleashes a bombshell: The baby is a girl, which means it isn't the embryo he implanted. Which means that the baby is Marc's. Suddenly, Tab’s carefully laid plans for the future go haywire in all aspects of her life. Chris, her ratings-hungry boss at the TV station where she works as a news reporter, informs her that viewers have filed complaints about seeing her natural hair on air; Marc wants to be more than friends; and her father might be having an affair, again. Over the course of nine months, Tab can’t help but wonder whether this is the happy ending she chose for herself or whether it was simply decided for her. Author Allen moves through Tabitha’s pregnancy at an efficient pace, writing with flowing, poetic prose, as in this passage when Tabitha unloosens her braids: “They felt glorious, like thick grapevines hanging from my scalp. I let my eyes linger on them lovingly. This moment was my truth. Here I was, the real me—unfurled, free, unrestrained, wild in my spirit and natural in my appearance.” Tabitha’s journey is raw and real, and Allen’s description of the different realities of motherhood is exceedingly authentic and powerful, as demonstrated through this moniker that Tabitha applies to herself: “single mother by courage.”
An exceptional sequel that will leave readers eager for more.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-313-792-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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