A highly readable story of ties that bind and skeletons in the closet.
In Blumenfeld’s novel, a teacher deals with her childhood best friend’s impending release from prison.
April Nelson is a Brooklyn, New York, native who’s built a solid life for herself in Chicago. She’s an elementary school teacher who’s married to Peter, a lawyer who’s running for state’s attorney, and with three young kids to raise and aging parents back in New York, she has a busy life. However, elements of her past return to haunt her. In college, she and her childhood friend and neighbor, Rudy DeFranco, went to a bar, where an altercation ensued in which Rudy pulled a knife; after a struggle, the knife fell to the ground, April grabbed it, and she and Rudy fled the scene before fully taking in what happened. The other party died the next day, and Rudy ended up in prison; April was later expelled from college. Now, Rudy is being released from prison. April is already getting calls from the media, and she hopes to prevent any damage to Peter’s political aspirations, and to her other family members’ lives. Specifically, Jillian Jones, a journalist who went to college with April, has learned of the new developments; she covered the crime for their college newspaper years ago. Now a newspaper reporter in Manhattan, she knows that it could be a big story. Blumenfeld’s follow up to 2018’s The Cast features a clearheaded and ambitious protagonist who essentially carries the novel. The author effectively describes April’s history as a New Yorker, as well as her current circumstances and fraught emotions, in a way that feel realistic and relatable. Her history is complicated, as Jillian discovers, and April’s feelings about Rudy are, too, but the narrative relates it all clearly; however, readers may feel that the characterization of April’s politically ambitious husband is left on the back burner for too long. Overall, though, this engaging novel succeeds as a story of dealing with the consequences and challenges of decisions made in one’s youth.
A highly readable story of ties that bind and skeletons in the closet.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781684633227
Page Count: 360
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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