A remarkable, virtuosic performance that will certainly leave persistent echoes in the reader’s mind.
Against a historical backdrop of UFO sightings, a dying man tries to nudge the world along a righteous path in Kaufman’s novel.
Rhome, Texas, 1897. August Simms has returned to Rhome ostensibly to investigate reports of mysterious airships landing there. But his purpose for returning to Rhome is twofold. August is also dying and wants to spend his final days at the Martin family boardinghouse where his wife, Christy, died some 15 years before, and he wants to be buried beside her. But life keeps happening in the interim to interfere with his plans. Nadine Martin now runs the boardinghouse and doesn’t remember August at first. But her father was murdered back then, just before Christy’s death, and the true killer (as everyone knew) was spirited off by the railroad bosses; Luther Williams, an innocent local Black man, was lynched instead. August and his old friend Judge Proctor are racked with guilt over not doing enough to stop Luther’s lynching. Racism, no surprise, is alive and well in Rhome in 1897. But then something else comes to light that’s even more incendiary than anything related to racially motivated hate crime. The righteous townspeople (spurred on by the railroad crew) are enraged and will do anything they can to save innocent people in harm’s way. There are more good people to be noted, like Bill Ackerman, August’s wagon driver and wingman, and huge Bose Williams, son of Luther, and Natalie Martin, Nadine’s daughter, who is suffering the throes of adolescence. Kaufman is a fantastic writer with a distinctive poetic touch (consider such lapidary phrases as “a smile threatening the corners of his mouth” or “morning arrives like a shovel to the head”). And August Simms is a charming, sympathetic protagonist; he’s a true font of wisdom and a still point in the storms that rage in Rhome. It will be the rare reader who will not be moved by this soulful, poignant novel.
A remarkable, virtuosic performance that will certainly leave persistent echoes in the reader’s mind.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781685132620
Page Count: 284
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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