Kimberly Hirsh

When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman is a middle grade novel that imagines what Anne Frank’s life might have been like before she had to move to the attic of her father’s office building. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Bestselling author Alice Hoffman delivers a stunning novel about one of contemporary history’s most acclaimed figures, exploring the little-known details of Anne Frank’s life before she went into hiding.

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl has captivated and inspired readers for decades. Published posthumously by her bereaved father, Anne’s journal, written while she and her family were in hiding during World War II, has become one of the central texts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, as well as a work of literary genius.

With the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the Frank family’s life is turned inside out, blow by blow, restriction by restriction. Prejudice, loss, and terror run rampant, and Anne is forced to bear witness as ordinary people become monsters, and children and families are caught up in the inescapable tide of violence.

In the midst of impossible danger, Anne, audacious and creative and fearless, discovers who she truly is. With a wisdom far beyond her years, she will become a writer who will go on to change the world as we know it.

Critically acclaimed author Alice Hoffman weaves a lyrical and heart-wrenching story of the way the world closes in on the Frank family from the moment the Nazis invade the Netherlands until they are forced into hiding, bringing Anne to bold, vivid life.

Based on extensive research and published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, When We Flew Away is an extraordinary and moving tour de force

.I’m going to diverge from my usual review format for this book and be a bit more stream of consciousness. But I hope you’ll still get a sense of the book and whether it might be for you, someone you love, or someone you work with.

I’ve never read anything by Alice Hoffmann before, and many other reviews talk about her using lyrical language and that being a struggle for them. For me, the early chapters of the book read like a middle grade nonfiction book, describing Anne’s experiences, with little dialogue or direct action portrayed. I think that’s a bit tricky, especially for a book like this that isn’t nonfiction but draws heavily on research and might be hard to distinguish from nonfiction.

The lack of action and dialogue made it hard for me to read this at first, but eventually I really got into imagining Anne’s life in the city of Amsterdam, and that’s what really brought the book to life for me. I think many of us only imagine Anne in hiding during the Holocaust, rarely thinking about the many years of her life before this event that both defined her literary voice and led to her death.

That’s the great joy in When We Flew Away for me: thinking about her daily life before going into hiding. Anne went to bookstores. She ate ice cream. She flirted with boys. She ice skated. And all of these activities and more are things she does in this book.

Like many women, I imagine, Anne Frank’s diary was very important to me as a young person. I first read it in sixth or seventh grade. I read it again before auditioning for the play adaption of it when I was in ninth grade, and I think I’ve probably read it again as an adult. One of the things that’s so remarkable about Anne Frank’s diary is how true to the developmental experiences of a wide variety of Western teenagers across time and place it is. I think many young people reading it can see their own dreams and anxieties, family relationships and hopes for romance, in Anne’s writing.

Because Anne’s writing has been so important to me, I made it a priority to visit the Anne Frank House while I was in Amsterdam. Before you go into the attic, you walk through rooms with video and audio about the time Anne was living in and the expansion of Nazi occupation into the Netherlands. Then you walk through the bookcase hiding a secret door and up a very narrow staircase (typical of staircases in Amsterdam) and find yourself in the attic.

Wandering through the rooms, I was disheartened by how hard it was to feel connected to that time long ago and the people who lived there, even though I was in their space. I was surprised by the things that really made me feel closer to their experience: the pencil lines on the wall tracking Anne and Margot’s heights. The view of a tree through the one place Anne could see the sky.

And of course, seeing the diary itself. That was the most powerful thing of all.

In the same way that seeing these things helped me understand Anne’s experiences, reading this book and thinking about the things I experienced in Amsterdam beyond the Anne Frank House added a whole new dimension to my understanding of her life. Anne walked the same streets I did. She looked at the same houses I did. She went to the same parks.

Readers who need action and dialogue to stay engaged with a book will struggle with this book, but readers who want details that help them imagine other people’s lives more fully will find so much here.

Book: When We Flew Away
Author: Alice Hoffman
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Pages: 304
Age Range: Middle Grade
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley

This is a romance. I would say on the romance.io steam rating scale, this is 🔥🔥: behind closed doors.

Helena Greer’s romances set at Carrigan’s Christmasland, a magical lodge/Christmas tree farm in the Adirondacks owned by a Jewish family, come to a close with Hers for the Weekend. Carrigan’s is a place as real to me as many of the actual magical-feeling places I’ve been in my life and the Carrigan’s Crew are all immensely lovable people with supremely relatable flaws.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

No-nonsense Tara Sloane Chadwick is practically perfect. An impeccably mannered Southern belle, she’s the youngest to make partner at her law firm and still friends with all her exes. However, when the woman behind her most humiliating breakup invites Tara to her wedding, Tara panics at the thought of showing up alone and impulsively declares she’s bringing her very serious girlfriend.

One issue: Tara is seriously single.

Waitress and wild child Holly Siobhan Delaney may be lusting over Tara—but Tara only dates women she can marry, and Holly’s sworn off relationships. So when Tara needs a fake girlfriend, Holly’s eager to propose a no-strings, temporary fling. Only sharing secrets and steamy kisses show Holly the caring woman beneath Tara’s picture-perfect exterior, tempting Holly to break her own rules. Can these two opposites trust their feelings enough to try for forever—or will their relationship go down in flames?

What I loved

Helena Greer’s whole deal is taking beloved Hallmark tropes and queering them. In this one, the frosty blonde fiancée gets the girl. And I adore this frosty blonde fiancée. Tara Sloane Chadwick is a Southern belle with a wild past using her degree from Duke law (where my Dad probably would have been working when Tara was in law school, if she were real!) to subvert the inequitable justice system from whose bias she benefited as a young person.

Tara is less ice queen than snow queen: she just needs someone to help her melt. And a propos of a snow queen (of which I am one, which is to say, I melt easily), her favorite Disney movie is Frozen II. This comes up in the book A Lot. If you don’t know the movie, you’ll be fine, but if it spoke to your heart (it did to me, even more than Frozen), you are going to appreciate a lot of bits of this book even more than you would otherwise. So I love this, I love Tara feeling like she’s Elsa.

I love that Tara struggles to believe she is loved by her friends, especially her platonic twin-flame, Cole. But she is. And this is a romance novel so part of the happy ending is her accepting that love, eventually. But the journey, whew. It left me weeping.

Holly doesn’t speak to my heart as directly as Tara does. But she is still a great character, who has sanitized her punk rock self into a more socially-acceptable rockabilly quirky girl. Like Tara, she is haunted by a mistake she made in her youth and doesn’t trust herself because of it.

Both of these women mask themselves from the world and both of them, over the course of the book, will learn that it is not just okay, but actually great, for them to be themselves.

There are lots of fun Christmas wedding hijinks here, and if you’ve read the first two Carrigan’s books, all the Carrigan’s interactions will feel extra rich and make everything more fun. (And if you haven’t, you should. They’re great.) All of the secondary characters feel full and whole.

What I wanted more of

Listen, I have no notes, I’m just sad not to have new Carrigan’s stories.

What I need to warn you about

There are some really awful parents in here. Helena Greer writes great warnings at the start of her books, so be sure to check those out.

Who should read this

Anyone who likes to cry during their rom-coms. Anyone who wants the ice queen blonde fiancée to get a happy ending after her quirky partner leaves her. Anyone who wants to spend time in an idyllic mountain area with a festive destination and a delightfully queer-friendly and racially-diverse small town. People who like Courtney Kae’s books.

Book: Hers for the Weekend
Author: Helena Greer
Publisher: Forever
Publication Date: August 27, 2024.
Pages: 368
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley

If the Paris 2024 Olympic Opening Ceremony has you dreaming of reads with Parisian vibes, I’ve got a new release for you. Love Requires Chocolate, by Ravynn K. Stringfield, is a coming-of-age story with a soupçon of romance (it has a happy ending but the romance takes a back seat to the coming-of-age). It releases on August 20 and I loved it.

(Full disclosure: Dr. Stringfield was my instructor for a workshop on creative non-fiction writing for academics. We have since bonded over our shared loves of comics and YA fiction, as well as our shared experiences navigating PhD programs and life after them. We’re Internet friends.)

Here’s the publisher’s description:

Whitney Curry is primed to have an epic semester abroad. She’s created the perfect itinerary and many, many to-do lists after collecting every detail possible about Paris, France. Thus, she anticipates a grand adventure filled with vintage boutiques, her idol Josephine Baker’s old stomping grounds, and endless plays sure to inspire the ones she writes and—ahem—directs!

But all is not as she imagined when she’s dropped off at her prestigious new Parisian lycée. A fish out of water, Whitney struggles to juggle schoolwork, homesickness, and mastering the French language. Luckily, she lives for the drama. Literally.

Cue French tutor Thierry Magnon, a grumpy yet très handsome soccer star, who’s determined to show Whitney the real Paris. Is this type-A theater nerd ready to see how lessons on the City of Lights can turn into lessons on love?

What I Loved

I mean, everything? But specifically? Whitney is a list girlie. I love a list girlie. She has Plans. Her fashion is always on point. (Check out Ravynn’s WhitneyCurryCore reel on Instagram.) Her love of theater is palpable. Her knowledge about Josephine Baker is impressive but her commitment to learning more is even more impressive. Whitney’s mixture of confidence and insecurity resonates so hard for this type A- former theater teen.

Whitney herself is enough to make this book awesome. But Stringfield layers in an incredible sense of place. Yes, she gives you plenty of looks at tourist destinations, but it’s the more quotidian Parisian moments that make this feel lived-in. Whitney gets lost in Montmartre. She has a dinner party at Thierry’s family’s home. She explores the streets of Paris. She sings “J’ai deux amours” swinging from a street lamp. (And have you seen a Parisian street lamp? They’re gorgeous.) Oh look, here I am trying to talk about Paris and ending up still telling you how much I love Whitney Curry. Whoops. Well, just trust that this book is full of awesome Parisian places, because Stringfield was a flâneuse herself when she studied abroad.

I love Whitney’s growth, her passion, and her outlook.

I love the romantic elements here, too. Thierry is wonderful. I mean a grouchy footballer whose family owns a chocolate shop? Come on. I mean. (This brought to you partly by my new obsession with retired footballer Zizou and partly by my old obsession with Roy Kent.)

Something that I think is worth pointing out is that Whitney is a Black American looking for the history and culture of Black Americans in Paris as well as Black Parisians of any descent. The importance of this piece of Whitney’s identity adds another layer to the Bildungsroman vibes. As a white woman I don’t feel equipped to discuss all the work Stringfield has done here at length, but I really appreciate her highlighting how important this is to Whitney, the conflicting feelings Whitney experiences about Josephine Baker’s recognition as an artist of Paris coming about after her death, and the contrast between Whitney’s image of how Black people experience Paris and the reality Thierry, whose grandmother came to Paris from Mali to escape trouble caused by French colonialism, shares with her.

What I wanted more of

The adventures of Whitney Curry? This is the first in a series but it’s an anthology series, so the other books will be by other authors and about other characters. Guess I better start writing some Love Requires Chocolate fanfiction.

What I need to warn you about

Not much. There is, as you might have guessed from what I said earlier, discussion of racism.

Who should read this

People who love Paris or think they might love Paris. Theater nerds. Football (i.e., soccer) fans. People who enjoy YA romance. People who like chocolate.

Book: Love Requires Chocolate
Author: Ravynn K. Stringfield
Publisher: Joy Revolution
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Pages: 288
Age Range: Young Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley (but I loved it so much I pre-ordered it too)