A good story in a great setting that will draw in readers.
A writer born and raised in Honolulu offers an insider’s perspective on Hawaii in a debut historical novel about a family that moves there before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the depths of the Depression, the Doyles—Sadira, aka Sadie, and Archie, and their sons, Lionel and Kenny—chafe against the limits of their small town in upstate New York. Tongues wag in Carlisle, mostly about Archie’s drinking. After one too many binges, he’s fired from his job but recommended for one in Hawaii. With high hopes the Doyles set sail in 1936 and find much good in paradise. Sadie snags a job as the society writer for the Honolulu Chronicle, and she is kept busy given that Honolulu is a favorite stop for celebrities and wannabes. But Archie can’t put the cork back in the bottle and squanders more than one opportunity. Kenny, a normal kid, is happy enough, but older brother Lionel is a sensitive (and perceptive) young man subject to wild mood swings. From alternating perspectives, Matthews shows daily life in Hawaii and the trauma of Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. An experienced writer and writing teacher, she ably tells her story through a dual point of view with some sections narrated by Sadie and some by Lionel. Lionel’s perspective is impressive, but in many ways he’s a typical high-drama teenager. Sadie enjoys the glamour of her job even while complaining about it. The Doyles’ story has some wonderfully realized characters, like Renee Manchester, who at first seems a classic floozie but who, readers learn, has much more to her. And the Doyles’ landlady, Mrs. Fong, is a paragon of tough love and wise counsel. But it’s Sadie who holds the family together and who at book’s end is battered but unbowed. Spanning the years from the influenza pandemic of 1918 until the aftermath of World War II in 1946, this story is a saga that earns its magnetism.
A good story in a great setting that will draw in readers.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-57869-091-6
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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