A canny and engrossing rewiring of the big-city romance.
A May-December romance rapidly hits turbulence in early-aughts Manhattan.
Mellors’ remarkably assured and sensitive debut opens with a meet-cute that’s as charming and frothy as it is misleading. On New Year’s Eve 2006, Cleo, a 24-year-old budding British artist, shares an elevator with Frank, a 40-something ad exec. Easy banter leads to flirtation, and flirtation speeds to romance; within six months, they’re married. Figuring out whether that decision has to do with true love, keeping Cleo in the country, or satisfying other suppressed needs is just one of the storm clouds that soon blow in. Quentin, Cleo’s closest friend, is consumed by a jealousy he sublimates into drugs and sex. Cleo’s art ambitions go sideways. Frank’s drinking regresses into alcoholism. His fashion-student sister, Zoe, grows reckless, needy, and similarly addictive. Eleanor, a young copywriter at Frank’s firm, is a perceived threat. Affairs are considered and/or consummated. The novel’s somber stretches, wide cast of characters, and cross sections of New York social spheres strongly evoke Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, but Mellors also cultivates a sprightlier style that keeps the novel’s familiar tropes from feeling clichéd or reducing her characters to types. (Think of Armistead Maupin or Laurie Colwin in a moodier register.) She’s playful with characterization and voice; Eleanor’s sections are distinctively written in the first-person, with a young writer’s pitch-perfect brashness and anxiety. And she describes parties, workplaces, apartments, and familial dynamics with impressive sophistication. She has a knack for crisp, witty summaries, as in her description of a seedy underground gay club that Quentin haunts: “They’d striven for Grecian fantasy and ended up with Greek restaurant.” But the humor doesn’t overwhelm the melancholy heart of the story: At its core, it’s a novel about how love and lovers are easily misinterpreted and how romantic troubles affect friends and family.
A canny and engrossing rewiring of the big-city romance.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63557-681-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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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