An engaging read, particularly for cat lovers, and a promising debut.
A fictionalized saga of a real-life Hungarian refugee turned cat rescuer.
In her debut novel, Caruthers takes on the nearly impossible task of piecing together a life kept purposefully hidden. She combines research and imagination to pay tribute to her departed friend Vivie Degirdro, a college professor and cat lover with a tragic past. The narrative, though fictionalized, will still give readers an idea of the resilient, intelligent, and compassionate woman that Caruthers knew. On the eve of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, 12-year old Vivie Degirdro is forced to flee a suburb of Budapest on foot with her affluent parents and young sister. All too quickly, Vivie’s carefree innocence is tempered by violence and cruelty, which they encounter with every passing mile. When her loving family is irreparably shattered by tragedy, Vivie must find a way forwardin America while guarding a family secret that she’s resolved to take to the grave. In her sojourn across Europe and beyond, Vivie exhibits ingenuity, determination, and a notable affinity for animals. She’s shaken by the abrupt loss of her cat in her initial escape from Budapest, but her bond with the many cats she encounters afterward becomes her greatest comfort. The cat-centered moments sometimes feel tonally unbalanced, as they’re juxtaposed with genuinely harrowing scenes in which Vivie flees gunmen on a moving train or witnesses a brutal assault. The latter scenes feel more visceral and arresting than the former, in which she expounds on the importance of spaying strays, for instance, or tearfully mourns her pet. As the novel follows Vivie into adulthood, the pacing begins to slow as the story meanders through various loosely connected snippets, although cats continue to be a major feature. Nonetheless, the author’s prose offers strong, memorable imagery: “In the moonlight, Vivie stared out across the distant field at the chevaux-de-frise. The large, wooden-spiked, knife-rest barriers lined the acreage as though a child had taken a fat brown crayon and drawn giant asterisks across the expanse.” Despite the story’s rough edges, Caruthers reveals stalwart empathy and admiration, not just for her friend, but for anyone who seeks to make positive change in a world of suffering.
An engaging read, particularly for cat lovers, and a promising debut.Pub Date: July 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68433-527-5
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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