A cleverly conceived, character-driven, if overstuffed, anthology sure to delight and enchant.
A debut collection of brief stories reflects on the human condition.
Beginning as a campaign to write one tale a week for 50 weeks, Becker’s book spans many literary genres, moods, and situations, all set in a succession of American states. While many stories create mere cursory circumstances sketched over an economy of pages as the subtitle suggests, others are somewhat lengthier, like the opener, “Broken People,” starring an Idaho farmer and father of four. The man aches for absolution years after a tragedy. The irony and sometimes the cruelty of humankind ground much of this collection, making it both thoughtful and relatable. The ways furniture connects to a family unit constitute the Connecticut-set tale “The Lake House”; next-door strangers finally find common ground in “Good Neighbors” just as one family moves away; and ruthless looters take advantage of Oregon’s wildfire season in “Where There’s Smoke.” The volume’s standout quality lies in its variety. Pain and passion intermingle with history and culture (New Orleans Voodoo, Alaska, the circus) while a mixture of spontaneous adventures and deadly consequences saturates many stories, like “Dead Ends,” in which a couple on a Utah desert highway recklessly take a detour. They end up embroiled in a nightmarish government biohazard contamination setting. The Halloween yarn “Shine on You Crazy Diamonds” features a haunted house bedeviling a group of Detroit friends who gathered there as kids. As impressive as some of the longer tales are, the shorter entries can pack the same punch, as in the single-page drama “The Blue Door.” Here, a California woman who abandons her marriage still feels a scintillating pinch of sorrow, freedom, and terror at relinquishing her husband’s “safety net that would never catch her again.” As an anthology, Becker’s book is ultimately satisfying, if uneven in spots. Some stories lack enough narrative definition or distinguishing characteristics to link them to their locations. Still, the varying states of the characters’ minds form a kaleidoscopic array of reflections, regrets, accomplishments, and the stress of both good and bad relationships. Whether melancholy or blissful, each of Becker’s tales offers an engaging coda and even some food for thought for readers who enjoy vivid short stories grounded in humanity.
A cleverly conceived, character-driven, if overstuffed, anthology sure to delight and enchant.Pub Date: July 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-00-681115-9
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Blurb
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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