Historical novel with a feminist bent and heart to spare.
A group of women deal with the social changes of the mid-1960s in Becker's brightly polished novel.
In Akron, Ohio, in 1965, 26-year-old Lily Berg is happy to consider herself a housewife. Married to a busy physician, she has a toddler and is pregnant with another child. Her sister, Rose Seigel, two years younger, is married to an attorney and working as an elementary school teacher. Lily meets regularly to play canasta with three of her neighbors, and they pass around copies of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which Lily finds at first horrifying and then intriguing and even comforting. To help around the house, Lily enlists the aid of perky 15-year-old Betsy Eubanks, on loan from the local home for unwed mothers while she waits to deliver her own baby, and the two mothers-to-be become surprisingly close. Over the course of the next few months, Lily and the other women in her circle face a series of challenges, including domestic violence, the need for an illegal abortion, infertility, and divorce. The novel rotates in brisk, snappy chapters through the points of view of Lily, Rose, and Betsy. To some extent, it suffers from a tendency to condescend to its characters for behaving and thinking in ways the author seems to view, from her present-day perspective, as less than enlightened. Becker makes it clear that, though the characters don't know it, Lily's willed joy in playing housewife and Rose's determined rationalizations of her husband's increasingly abusive behavior are doomed from the start. The various storylines are also wrapped up with tidy efficiency and unlikely positivity. But aside from one thoroughgoing scoundrel, the characters are charming and likable, and readers should enjoy spending time with them. Becker doesn't allow her consideration of social issues to overwhelm a brisk narrative in which the characters are too competent and spunky to get caught more than temporarily in melodrama.
Historical novel with a feminist bent and heart to spare.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780063423244
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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