A miserably dull assemblage of cliches presented as satire.
A couple weathers the cultural distance between their families and contends with Mexican kidnappers in Smith’s novel.
Aron Goldfarb and Samantha O’Malley make for an unlikely pair: He’s of Jewish ancestry, grew up in Detroit, and has been a stereotypical urbanite his entire life; her family lives in the South and is exemplary of the southern tradition, made up of tough outdoorsman who prefer hunting wildlife to the trappings of metropolitan life. Unfortunately, every character in this dreary comedy is a stale caricature. Aron survives the O’Malley’s largely amiable “interrogations,” though not without some episodes of humiliation—the humor is clearly intended to be of the madcap variety, but every scene is banally formulaic. Aron and Sam wed and struggle to have a baby. A nurse cautions Sam about of one of the rigors of pregnancy in a typical example of the novel’s labored attempts at humor: “During that second trimester you are going to feel so hot and so ready that you are going to want to ride that man like a pump handle – up-down, up-down, up-down until he is dry. Just go get him. Towards the end your organisms might hurt the baby by starting premature contractions, but until then go after him like you were a bear trap.” One couldn’t possibly furnish an adequate summary of this maddeningly meandering book—in the place of a plot is a series of comic set pieces, each as tiresome as the last (Aron takes a trip to west Texas on a hunting expedition with his wife’s brother-in-law, Larry, and they end up getting kidnapped by Mexican gangsters). One must credit the author for packing his novel with dramatic action—there are no pauses in this briskly paced work. However, it is a wearisome affair, absent real characters, a coherent story, or any genuine humor.
A miserably dull assemblage of cliches presented as satire.Pub Date: June 26, 2023
ISBN: 9798887031958
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Litprime Solutions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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