So sharp, so funny. You might feel better or worse about your own life, but you'll definitely be laughing.
What if "the memo" wasn't a metaphor, and you really didn't get it?
At 35, Jenny Green is happy-ish. She lives in Pittsburgh—not exactly the center of the universe—with Hal, an unambitious but super-hot guy she met nine years ago on a beach in Costa Rica. She works for a philanthropy that supports girls and women, which sounds good on paper, but it's really a vanity project for a wealthy nightmare of a woman who only wants Jenny to get her coverage in the national media. Oh, and it turns out Hal is having an affair. Jenny has no desire to go to her 15-year college reunion, but she skipped the last one and her (more successful) friends are persistent. What she doesn't expect, once on campus, is to run into Desiree LeBlanc, the pushy career counselor whose advice she spurned just before graduation—and who's now offering her another chance. It turns out Desiree had been planning to give her the Memo—the "actual, tangible, Upper-Case-Letter thing"—and the fact that Jenny has spent her life floundering can be attributed to her having walked away. But Jenny isn't just going to be following the Memo's advice going forward; Desiree and her Consortium have discovered a way to send her back to crucial moments in the past with explicit instructions on what she should be doing to turn herself into a self-actualized superwoman. What could go wrong? Dodes and Mechling have come up with a great concept—the elevator pitch writes itself!—and filled it with insight, wit, and perfectly chosen details of life among a segment of the population that might once have looked at Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In as a guide. They explore issues of love, work, friendship, ambition, and fulfillment that feel timeless yet particularly pertinent in the social media era, when it's so hard to see past the surface of other people's high-powered facades.
So sharp, so funny. You might feel better or worse about your own life, but you'll definitely be laughing.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780063319356
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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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