Deception and tenderness mingle in this touching story.
A mother’s carefully stacked house of cards collapses when a daughter goes sleuthing.
Vandy Guru is a successful advice columnist who has all the answers. That is, until her husband, Vir, passes away, leaving her with grief and an inability to address her acolytes’ problems. Then her daughter, Mallika, a talented choreographer who’s recently auditioned for a Netflix film, goes missing. Mallika fails to meet her mother, who’s returning from a speaking tour, at the airport and then doesn't show up at her cousin’s wedding dance practice. Vandy calls her own mother, who offers up cryptic clues about where Mallika went but provides no real help, sending Vandy into a tailspin. While Vandy is at a loss, the reader is able to piece together the mystery as Dev alternates among chapters told from the perspectives of Vandy, Mallika, and Rani Parekh, a mysterious character whose story is slowly revealed. As Mallika deals with career setbacks and feelings of self-doubt, she begins to uncover a series of lies that profoundly alters her understanding of her family and her place in the world. Mallika’s journey of discovery sets off Vandy’s own journey, forcing Vandy to confront truths she has worked hard to keep hidden. Dev does not do enough to round out Mallika’s character, but the scenes between Vandy and her childhood friend Rani are funny, genuine, and, at times, heartbreaking. While the story does hinge on some less-than-believable events, Dev’s characteristic strength at writing relationships between loved ones grounds this larger-than-life plot in a poignant reality: “There was a whole chunk of her life that her daughter knew nothing about. What was the point of sharing something that caused so much pain? Vandy had found a solution, and she’d borne the consequences.”
Deception and tenderness mingle in this touching story.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781662513978
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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