A family oriented tale that's heartfelt and funny, by turns.
In Boerner’s novel, an older man and a child become friends during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis.
Theo Gruene is a retired botanist who lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and does volunteer work for the University of Arkansas. His idea of a perfect day is one he spends gluing plant specimens, such as a 1930s columbine, onto mounting paper. He loves order and solitude, but he’s still grieving the death of his beloved wife, Annie, 20 years before. Theo’s life is thrown into upheaval with the sudden arrival on his doorstep of an 8-1/2-year-old girl in a green raincoat that’s too big for her. Penelope Pie Palmer just missed her school bus and forgot her house key, so she asks if she can stay in his house until the current rainstorm passes and her mom returns home in a few hours. He initially sees the girl as a nuisance, but their interactions slowly cause Theo to venture out of his self-contained world. He adopts a stray dog; meets Penelope’s determined single mom, Ivy; and discovers good qualities about Nita Johnson, a neighbor whom he formerly considered a nosy gossip. However, difficulties arise when the Covid-19 pandemic shuts down Penelope’s school and Theo reluctantly tutors her so that her mom, a nurse’s aide, can still work. Then Ivy lands in the intensive-care unit, requiring a ventilator. After Theo temporarily accepts responsibility for Penelope’s welfare, new information about the girl, her mom, and Theo comes to light. Boerner’s story revolves around a likable cast: Theo, at first a self-centered hermit, becomes a caring member of society, upset about injustice. Ivy takes responsibility for a bad choice, and Nita wins over Theo by remaining herself. However, bright, chatty Penelope is the book’s star, providing abundant humor (such as calling her raincoat a “protectability cloak”), as well as emotional depth—accepting Theo, and others, despite their many flaws. The northwest Arkansas setting, with lovingly described wilderness areas, such as Devil’s Den and Yellow Rock Trail, enhances the story’s messages about grounding one’s life in the natural world and practicing simple values.
A family oriented tale that's heartfelt and funny, by turns.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781951418106
Page Count: 308
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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