A solid contribution to a popular genre, this novel skillfully brings history to life.
Holmstrom’s novel (Leaving Berlin, 2011, etc.) is a well-researched, riveting tale of witchcraft and hysteria.
Maig Bannatyne arrives in the small Scottish village of Sauchiedale on a bitterly cold night in 1604. She’s a pregnant widow and skilled brewer of ales who is searching for her late husband’s family. And though she does not find the family she seeks, Maig is welcomed by laird Edward Gibb, and she makes her home on his estate. Maig’s daughter Elspeth forms a unique bond with Gibb’s youngest son, Enoch, as she learns to read, write and study the Bible alongside the boy. While Enoch moves on to higher education and the ministry, Elspeth follows in her mother’s footsteps, also becoming a skilled and respected “brewster.” Eventually, Elspeth settles down with a family, and Enoch returns home to lead the parish of Sauchiedale. The story of Elspeth and Enoch provides a window into broader events of 17th-century Scotland, a period wracked with extreme weather leading to famine and widespread death. In an era of superstition and fear, uneducated people turn to hysteria as they search for the source of their suffering. There are mass trials and burnings of witches, and reasonable and caring neighbors accuse each other and blame the devil for their misery. Elspeth and Enoch continue to cross paths as Elspeth seeks answers to the mystery of God, suffering and loss, in a thoroughly researched historical novel with an engaging narrative form. The author lays the groundwork beautifully for her story, introducing well-rounded characters and crisp, realistic dialogue. She draws readers into the story and the minds of her characters, using a series of journal entries to reveal the remote, repressed mind of Enoch. By the end, the transition of the villagers from a tightknit group of neighbors to an accusatory and hysterical mob seems a forgone conclusion.
A solid contribution to a popular genre, this novel skillfully brings history to life.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-47769-345-2
Page Count: 398
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
