Packed with gothic plot, gushing blood, choking clods of dirt, and angry ghosts—a smorgasbord for devotees.
A Chinese American Upstairs, Downstairs meets Fall of the House of Usher meets young queer love.
Li’s adult fiction debut revolves around the death of an Oscar-winning Chinese actress named Vivian Yin. When asked to attend the reading of the will, Nora Deng, the granddaughter of Yin’s long-dead housekeeper and groundskeeper, is shocked to learn that Vivian made a last-minute change to the document, leaving her stately but spooky California home not to her own descendants but to Nora’s mother, Elaine Deng. WTF? Lucille Wang, Vivian’s daughter, is having none of it. Though the lawyer reports that her mother told him, “My daughters can’t have this house. It will ruin them,” Lucille is certain that Elaine forced Vivian to change her will, then killed her. She prevails on Elaine to let her; her troubled sister, Rennie; and her daughter, Madeline, stay in the house for a week to get Vivian's things together and “process" what's happening. Despite her intense hatred of the Yins, Elaine agrees, though she says she and Nora will be staying there, too. (One of many things not to think about too hard.) As that week rolls forward, a parallel timeline in the past unfolds the story of Vivian Yin’s life and marriage, revealing her to be both the victim and perpetrator of long-buried misdeeds. Though, in the present, the two families couldn’t be more at odds, Nora Deng and Madeline Wang discover they feel a connection to one another, one which only the reader knows is eerily predestined. And let’s not forget the immense, overgrown, long-untended garden, a very serious little shop of horrors. Is there too much stuffed into this novel? Are there a number of dubious plot elements? Are there any truly credible characters? Picky, picky, picky.
Packed with gothic plot, gushing blood, choking clods of dirt, and angry ghosts—a smorgasbord for devotees.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781668051726
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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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