An enjoyable romance brings Black history into the present.
A Black couple’s romance ties together the past and the present in Hill’s novel.
The author interweaves a present-day storyline—photographer Alessandra Fleming leaves Manhattan for her hometown of Sag Harbor, New York, after her widowed and estranged father is hospitalized—with a series of first-person narratives that relate the story of Ayah, a woman kidnapped and enslaved in the 19th century. When she returns to Sag Harbor, Alessandra meets her neighbor’s grandson Zach Renard, an ethnographer studying the history of free Black communities on Long Island. The two feel an instant connection that intensifies as Zach supports Alessandra through her father’s final days. She is determined to understand the family secrets her parents kept from her as well as the increasing number of unnerving experiences she has been having, sensing sights, sounds, and smells that are not there. When Alessandra discovers a chest full of newspaper clippings, photos, and other artifacts, Zach brings his research skills to bear, and together they uncover Alessandra’s family history and its place in the Black diaspora. The emotionally satisfying love story is complemented by the book’s solid historical grounding as well as a cast of well-developed supporting characters—Zach’s grandmother Grace Oweku; Alessandra’s elderly neighbor Edith Samuels; and her longtime best friend, Traci Howard—who come with backstories that could fill a separate novel. The writing and pacing are solid, making it easy to get hooked by the story. The book’s supernatural elements (“When she opened the door to her space, a sudden flash of seeing herself stepping into a dim, lantern-lit room that smelled of damp wood, sea moss, and dirt floors leaped in front of her. The surreal moment seized her breath. She gripped the doorframe, shook her head, and the image scattered like startled birds”) echo those in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred while allowing Alessandra’s story to remain entirely its own. The narrative explores issues of systemic racism, slavery, generational wealth-building, and chosen families, addressing them organically without overwhelming the reader with heavy-handed messages. Distinguished by its intense and passionate love story and its insistence on the contemporary relevance of historical events, this engaging tale will keep the reader turning pages until the end.
An enjoyable romance brings Black history into the present.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781649371454
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Sideways Books
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
