There are insightful observations about friendship, but disconnected ideas gum up the works.
The all-consuming friendship of two upper-class girls in 19th-century Montreal.
Marie Antoine and Sadie Arnett grow up in the Golden Mile, a wealthy neighborhood where Marie is the daughter of the richest man in the city while Sadie’s family struggles to keep up appearances. Psychopathic Sadie easily manipulates the spoiled Marie Antoine. Sadie’s mother recognizes this darkness in her daughter and abandons her to it: “Sadie would pretend to have feelings to get what she wanted. That was how manipulative Sadie was.” The girls confide in each other, push the limits of acceptable behavior, and are “delighted by their indecency.” Yet theirs isn’t a loving friendship. They’re competitive rivals: “Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive.” When they accidentally murder a maid while pretending at a duel, Sadie is sent overseas. A strict boarding school shapes her identity, and her youthful perversions blossom. The first half of the book is a slow build, concentrating more on character development than action. Sadie returns from boarding school as an adult and takes up residence in a whorehouse in the Squalid Mile, a foil to the girls’ upper-class neighborhood. Marie inherits her father’s sugar factory and becomes a coldhearted boss. In its second half, the book takes on too many ideas without bringing them together. A plotline involving a trans character’s search for identity is given surface-level treatment. Sadie releases a sadistic roman à clef about “the violent delight of female desire,” and women across the city awaken to either their sexual power or their need for safe working conditions, but not both. Marie and Sadie lock themselves away from the world, while a pretender to Marie’s throne plots her demise. Ideas about girl power, friendship, gender identity, class, sexual sadism, mistaken identity, and the dehumanizing nature of the Industrial Revolution compete for center stage in this overlong tale with a predictable twist ending.
There are insightful observations about friendship, but disconnected ideas gum up the works.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-42290-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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