An adroit, dry-witted tale about a strong-willed woman trying to live her life.
A woman in 1948 New York City tests the waters of personal independence.
At the opening of Parrish’s novel, a young woman named Edith Sloan is working as a typist in New York, staying with her aunt Margaret, and keeping up a steady correspondence with her law student husband, Walter, who’s at Harvard Law School on the GI Bill. Edith is away from her husband but she’s hardly miserable: She has a job, complete independence, and loves living and bantering with her free-spirited aunt. Edith originally left Walter amicably enough, but the letters from him and his parents (and her own folks) urging her to return to Cambridge and the marriage have become increasingly imploring. Eventually, grudgingly, she decides to leave her life in New York and attempt to become Walter’s idea of a dutiful wife in Massachusetts as he finishes his studies and seeks to become a successful lawyer. This works about as well as readers might expect, and along the way, Edith must also deal with the worsening illness of her stern father and the not-so-subtle condescension of her new peers in Cambridge. Parrish employs a wonderfully light touch throughout these stories of Edith’s adventures, always drawing readers right up to the brink of a flat realization about some situation and then pulling back and letting them step into it themselves. Although Edith is a consistently well-realized and enjoyable character in her own right, another of the book’s strengths is the understated way the author makes Walter the stand-in for an entire generation that expressed offhand sexism. He cluelessly tells Edith, for instance, that he admires her compassion––it’s a beautiful trait in a woman and suggests “the loving mother she would eventually become,” casually adding, “Every woman wants to be a mother.” (He even tells Edith she should ignore book reviews, the clod.) Readers will be quietly cheering for Edith to conquer all.
An adroit, dry-witted tale about a strong-willed woman trying to live her life.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956692-34-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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