An anguished investigation of the way memories can warp lives.
Two generations of a dysfunctional family struggle to find breathing room in this dark solo debut by the co-author of The Nanny Diaries (2002).
In 1957, Jayne Linden is relieved to escape her life in suburban Maryland to study at Radcliffe, where she meets and soon marries aspiring journalist Rodger Donaghue. Left behind in Maryland with their chilly mother and abusive father is Jayne’s younger sister, Bunny, who soon runs away to travel around the world, in the process producing three children. When she realizes she can’t raise them on her own, she drops them off with Jayne, who later has two children herself. Jayne goes on to divorce Rodger, who is now “the toast of New York’s intelligentsia,” setting off an acrimonious custody battle. One of Jayne’s children, Linden, is at the center of that battle, and her struggles over the next several decades become the focus of the second half of the novel, as Linden, an artist who makes spooky dioramas, attempts to uncover the secrets at the heart of her family. Fans of The Nanny Diaries and Kraus’ other novels written with Emma McLaughlin may be surprised at the story’s unremittingly bleak tone. Though Kraus spends some time dissecting the mores of upper-class New Yorkers and distinguishing between the behavior of those on the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side, her main concern is the way abuse echoes down through the generations, bewildering those caught in its wake. Kraus juggles the stories of a dozen characters deftly without losing her focus on Jayne and Linden, as she touches down on key scenes through several decades. As her haunted souls muddle through their lives, the reader senses patterns the characters will never fully realize.
An anguished investigation of the way memories can warp lives.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781662522642
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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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