A touching adventure full of laughs, tender moments, and a ton of not-so-baby bumps in the road.
Two expectant parents embark on a road trip full of twists and turns in hopes of reconnecting before their baby arrives.
In six weeks, Biz Petterelli and Wyatt Wallace will be fathers, though they’ve been feeling light-years apart. The two Brooklyn men are preparing for a cross-country babymoon that will hit all the best gay resort destinations: Provincetown, Palm Springs, the works. From there, they’ll head to Baker, California, in time to join their surrogate, Flora, as she welcomes their little one to the world...just as long as they follow Wyatt’s strictly detailed itinerary. Wyatt has always been a planner and is, in a way, overcompensating for his own absentee father by leaving no spreadsheet, mood board, or newborn checklist unturned. For Biz, this vacation is a last hurrah; lately, he’s been feeling completely freaked about being a dad. Both Biz and Wyatt skirt around communicating their parenting worries, leaving them not only distant from each other, but constantly on edge. It doesn’t help that once they set off on their trip, their resort plans are dashed in one fell swoop. Biz receives an email that he’s been laid off, and Wyatt gets a call from his mom urging him to come home. In their 1992 Volkswagen convertible, Wyatt and Biz rearrange their destinations, stopping to meet family, old friends, and an interesting stranger or two, and to let their dog, Matilda, puke on the side of the road when she pleases. As Wyatt and Biz reflect on their pasts, learn family secrets, and reminisce about their relationship milestones, each road-trip roadblock reminds them of what their future holds—and what they’ll be missing if they don’t fight for it. Karger’s second novel is a heartwarming, comedic journey of two partners finding each other again. The author creates meaningful connections not only between Wyatt and Biz, but between the couple and every character they meet, weaving a road trip of a lifetime with hints of nostalgia, hope, and acceptance.
A touching adventure full of laughs, tender moments, and a ton of not-so-baby bumps in the road.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780593439500
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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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