An unhurried tale about the flaws of the film industry and the healing power of human connection.
A screenwriter clears out her recently deceased grandfather’s home and learns about his youth as part of old Hollywood.
The book opens in 1957 as Hollywood hopeful Isabella Giori auditions for a part in an Alfred Hitchcock film. It’s not long before she’s on the rise to real stardom, but her budding career is cut short when she becomes pregnant. To avoid scandal, a Hollywood fixer moves her to a secluded cottage in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where she finds an unlikely friend. Sequestered in the cottage next door is Leo Chazan, a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who refused to name names during the ongoing Red Scare of the 1950s. The book then shifts to 2018, where Leo’s granddaughter, Gemma, is preparing to sell his cottage after his recent death. As she’s cleaning out the house, she discovers a safe full of secrets. She also gets to know some of the other residents of this cluster of secluded cottages, including Isabella Giori, and an intriguingly handsome young man named Sam Kenneally, who also knew her grandfather. As Gemma tries to piece together parts of her beloved grandfather’s history that she never knew, she also discovers important truths about herself and her desires. Told in the third person, the book shifts between 1957 and 2018 to paint a fuller picture of the lives of Isabella and Gemma and how they relate. Though the information about old Hollywood may interest film buffs, excessive details about films, Oscar ceremonies, and actors slow down the narrative and do little to advance the plot. The 2018 strand is more engaging, but also moves slowly as Gemma attempts to work through her emotions, failing to make progress for much of the book. Even so, the novel includes interesting commentary on the ways that women have been hindered in Hollywood both before and since the emergence of the #MeToo movement, as well as the unfairness with which members of the industry have been treated across generations. The author does an admirable job of exploring the issue of what constitutes success while also pulling back the curtain on Hollywood’s longtime underbelly.
An unhurried tale about the flaws of the film industry and the healing power of human connection.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780063422148
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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