This accomplished first novel artfully limns romantic cross-currents in a thoroughly contemporary setting.
A makeshift throuple—described from two alternating perspectives—makes for intricate, intimate complications.
More than a decade out of college, Jess and Ren are still roommates, sharing a rescue dog and a house in Hawaii. Jess is the hyper-responsible partner: Raised in alcohol-soaked poverty, she’s determined to maintain economic security at all costs—a likely outcome, given that she majored in business and runs her own real estate firm. Ren, bartender and part-time fitness instructor, has devolved into the child in this dyad. Though the two share expenses (loosely), Ren has grown accustomed to letting Jess attend to all the more taxing, adult routines of cohabitation: cooking, cleaning, etc. Though the two are very close, snuggling and sharing confidences, their relationship has never turned sexual. After a few halfhearted explorations with partners of varying genders, Jess has decided that she’s just not into it. Ren pegs her as not necessarily asexual—“maybe just aromantic.” For her part, Ren is guiltlessly free with her favors. When a drunken night with a visiting botany professor (described just vaguely enough to sound universally attractive) results in pregnancy, Ren, already at loose ends, decides to see it through, and then the professor reappears. Jess, rosily envisioning her role as co-parent, jumps right on board. That’s the setup—before ambivalence seeps in from all sides. The author is a whiz at conveying complex emotions, often with a swift metaphor. When the anxiety-prone Jess suffers a bout of guilt and shame, she recalls the dual emotion as having “blossomed like spores all over [her] body.” The women’s distinctive voices are artfully delineated and come across as fully three-dimensional. It doesn’t hurt that the sex scenes, when they arise, are not only believable but evocative.
This accomplished first novel artfully limns romantic cross-currents in a thoroughly contemporary setting.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780778369660
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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