A nostalgia-filled, often engaging small-town story of a girl who overcomes adversity with wit.
In the third installment of the Happy Valley Chronicles, second grader Celia Canterberry faces the seemingly impossible task of making new friends while dealing with human and imaginary enemies.
Seven-year-old Celia is distraught when her best friend, Archibald Quigley, abandons her for Eugenia Whitford—the niece of Enid Whitford, her grandmother’s employer whom Celia calls her “number one nemesis.” Celia’s teacher, Miss Dobbs, shamelessly favors Eugenia, hoping to win the heart of the youngster’s recently widowed father. Celia turns to her neighbor Old Lady Griggs for advice on how to make friends. Griggs is invested in helping Celia connect with others, drawing on tips from Dale Carnegie’s self-help classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. However, most of these strategies—sometimes due to Celia’s mistaken interpretations—don’t quite turn out as they’d hoped. Celia has impatience beyond her years that effectively furnishes the story with a tone of comedic grumpiness; for example, when Miss Dobbs has the class celebrate a Halloween “Spooktacular,” featuring presentations on notable Happy Valleyans, the girl is utterly annoyed: “As if a seven-year-old could scrounge up a useful and brand-new nugget of information. I mean, I could, but not the rest of these numbskulls.” Nan, her grandmother, instills in her a love for literature; they have a book club in which they read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, from which excerpts are quoted. Indeed, there are countless references to 19th- and 20th-century European and American literature and popular culture, which some readers will find delightful. Celia’s boundless imagination produces her “storybook” friends with whom she either interacts or whom she embodies during make-believe play. Readers may want to brush up on Moby-Dick, Jane Eyre, and The Scarlet Pimpernel before reading to avoid missing out on the nuances that these tales provide to this story. Overall, some will find this work to be reminiscent of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, although it’s aimed at an adult readership. Froese’s simple black-and-white line drawings depict various people and events in the text.
A nostalgia-filled, often engaging small-town story of a girl who overcomes adversity with wit.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Black Crow Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 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
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
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