An angst-filled love story about the value of growth and understanding.
A comedian and a musician just might be a perfect match, if only they can get the timing right.
Jess Henson meets Tom Delaney when he literally runs into her, knocking her to the ground outside an Indian restaurant in Edinburgh. She’s an up-and-coming comedian who dreams of having her big break, while he’s in a band that hopes to find success. Despite their movieworthy meet-cute, Tom runs off, squashing any hope for a romance. They meet again when they’re both featured at an artist showcase. They each have their own problems—Jess has a distrust of most people because her dad split when she was a kid, while Tom has severe anxiety that causes him to say the wrong things, self-medicate with alcohol, and even make up a fake girlfriend so his band mates won’t think he’s pathetic—but despite their communication problems, they feel a connection and spend a perfect evening together. That is, until they get jumped by some drunk football fans and Tom ends up in the hospital. Jess comes along, but then Tom’s best friend shows up and mentions Tom’s (fake) girlfriend. Tom is too doped up on painkillers to set the record straight, and Jess leaves, thus beginning a yearslong string of near misses and almost-kisses for Jess and Tom. Each time they reconnect, there’s something in the way—Jess’ bitterness, Tom’s anxiety, one of them seeing someone else. As their careers take off, they both have to figure out exactly what success means for them—and whether it involves each other. Nicholls writes with warmth and humor, giving Jess and Tom fully developed lives, friends, and families. It’s satisfying to watch them grow over the years, though the personal failings that keep them apart can be frustrating to read as their would-be relationship stalls again and again. Nicholls isn’t afraid to let Tom and Jess get mean and deal with personal tragedy (such as Tom’s musician grandfather’s death, Tom’s alcoholism and anxiety, and Jess’ relationship with her absent father), giving the story a realism that anchors the lighter aspects of their romance.
An angst-filled love story about the value of growth and understanding.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984826-89-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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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