Likable and mildly informative but lacks punch.
Wildgen explores the world of wine through the vicissitudes of two women's friendship.
Wren works in operations and Thessaly in sales at the high-end Lionel Garrett Wine Imports. They are wary colleagues. Self-conscious about her working-class Midwestern origins and single-minded in her commitment to the wine business, Wren considers Thessaly, who grew up on a large vineyard in Sonoma, a “golden girl,” while Thessaly sees Wren as “one of those worker-bee types.” Wren envies Thessaly’s apparent confidence, but actually Thessaly’s confidence is shaky, especially concerning her private ambition to create her own wines—and she has a drinking problem. When Lionel announces he will soon be stepping away from the business without naming his successor, his company becomes a hotbed of competition. Much of the book reads like a tame version of the TV drama Succession as Lionel’s erudite, cultured acolytes backbite and undermine each other over sips of Bordeaux. Despite their mutual distrust, Thessaly and Wren end up joining forces to compete as a team in the otherwise mostly White male establishment. Though they don’t get the job, the women bond personally and professionally, Wren helping Thessaly control her drinking, Thessaly improving Wren’s awkward communication skills and calming her anxiety. But when they open their own business, the existing cracks in their friendship widen. Despite her discerning palate, Wren’s ambition lies in growing her distribution business, which means finding and pushing wines that are easier to sell to a wider audience. Although she’s the gifted salesperson, Thessaly’s ambition is more complicated, more idiosyncratic, and less traditional. Therefore she’s also the more interesting character. Although each woman gets a romance, their lives are defined by their relationships to wine. Wildgen’s eagerness to show and tell the ins and outs of winemaking and wine selling, including examples of chicanery but also nobility, is endearing, but she’s mapped out her plot and main characters too obviously to let the narrative breathe.
Likable and mildly informative but lacks punch.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798985282832
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Zibby Books
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
