Carefully constructed, utterly predicable.
Williams returns to the fictional Winthrop Island with this contemporary story wrapped around a 19th-century shipwreck mystery.
In 1846, Providence Dare writes a painfully detailed Account of the Wreck of the Steamship Atlantic. Traveling under a false name, she’s on the run after the death her employer, famous painter Henry Irving, for whom she’d served as muse with benefits since his wife’s death. As a storm kicks up not far from Winthrop Island and survival at sea seems increasingly unlikely, Providence realizes she’s been followed aboard by a detective with a warrant for her arrest—for murder. Is she a victim or a predator? The detective’s feelings for her are as complicated as hers for Mr. Irving. (Providence is fictional, but the Atlantic was a real ship that sank in Long Island Sound.) Excerpts from the Account wind around events taking place on Winthrop in 2024, where Williams fans will encounter characters from previous novels; new readers will find the introductory family tree essential as names and connections pile up. Audrey Fisher, a chef who recently lost her restaurant after her business partner husband absconded with all their money, returns to the island for the first time since she was 3. She’s chaperoning her mother, Meredith Fisher, a famous actress with a drinking problem. Meredith has returned to sober up in private on Winthrop Island, where she grew up, always desperate to leave. Soon Audrey meets her father, Mike Kennedy, for the first time since she was a kid, and begins falling in love with a nice man. Then some paintings show up in a trunk and a stranger appears to confront Meredith about her past, and before long all hell breaks loose. The parallels that abound between the two narratives—strange fires, selfish artists, characters on the run, dark-haired men, lies about sex and death—are fun. But with the exception of Meredith, to whom Williams gives layered complexity, cliched characters march through familiar plotting.
Carefully constructed, utterly predicable.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593724255
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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