An engrossing novel that features a memorably strong, vibrant female character.
Sjoholm’s historical saga introduces readers to the ever-adventurous writer Dagny Bergland and her personal odysseys at sea and elsewhere.
At 18, the author’s protagonist, Dagny, marries the much older sea captain Edvard Bergland, and they sail around the world. They end up unofficially adopting young orphan Kjell Fossen in Lima, Peru, before fetching up in Port Townsend, Washington, after Edvard’s ship burns at anchor in San Francisco. Edvard, still almost always at sea, dies while ferrying prospectors to Alaska. Meanwhile, the U.S. government hatches a plan to entice the Sámi, renowned reindeer herders from the far north of Norway, to deliver 500 reindeer to eventually serve as food for starving gold miners. What the book eventually depicts is the tragic, wide-scale disruption of cultures against the backdrop of the 1898 gold rush. The character of Dagny is a writer, and she composes sketches to send to Norway, where folks are eager to learn of how their compatriots are faring in this new world. Dagny “adopts” the infant daughter of a dead Sámi woman whom she’d befriended and falls in love with a Sámi man much her junior. Eventually readers are led to believe that Dagny longs to return to Bergen—but does she? And then there’s the issue of the Sámi, whom the dominant Norwegians treated much the way those in the U.S. treated the Native Americans, destroying their culture and forcing their children into boarding schools. Sjoholm is an experienced writer and gifted storyteller, eloquent on the subject of Sámi prejudice and the poignant dilemma for all immigrants: Make a life for yourself in this new world, or surrender to the emotional pull of the old country? In that sense, the book tells a fascinating story of homesickness and prejudice. And while Dagny has her own demons (“Who does the past belong to and how do you mend the errors that you’ve made?”), she ends up being not just a survivor, but a humane model for all of us.
An engrossing novel that features a memorably strong, vibrant female character.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798991120609
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Cedar Street Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2024
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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