Tender love and chilling mob violence alternate in this engaging, disturbing period drama.
Twenty-something twins travel to Frankfurt, where unexpected adventure and turmoil await them.
The fourth installment of West’s Sir Anthony Standen Adventures opens in the summer of 1612. The family vineyard near Rome is producing well, and Sir Anthony decides to purchase the adjacent vineyard. Now they must expand their market for an anticipated increased yield. Maria suggests that she and her brother Antonio bring samples of their wine to the Frankfurt Trade Fair, where they hope to attract a large wine merchant. Little do the siblings suspect that they will find themselves in the middle of a murder mystery and political upheaval that will put their lives in danger. They enter Frankfurt, and as they gaze around at the vibrant, bustling main market square, Antonio notices that a handsome young man is admiring Maria. Enter Manuel Nuñez, a doctor with a complicated past who adds a new layer of interest to the novel. When Maria and Antonio visit the home of pawnbrokers Edith and Daniel Bamberger and later find the elderly Jewish couple’s murdered bodies, they vow to ferret out the killers, winding up embroiled in the “Fettmilch uprising,” a historically documented savage siege against Frankfurt’s small Jewish community. Here West reaches the heart of this episode—the story of the political unrest among the town merchants and the vicious antisemitism that is roiling Frankfurt. The early part of this installment, which for the first time uses the second generation of Standens exclusively as lead protagonists, progresses slowly, focusing on the budding romance between Maria and Manuel rather than on adventure. But with the discovery of the Bamberger murders, the narrative accelerates and moves into the realms of meticulous investigation, espionage, and high action that are the hallmarks of the Standen Adventures. West, as always, sprinkles informative historical tidbits within the story and seamlessly integrates early-17th-century conventions, styles, and such miraculous innovations as Manuel’s gadget the Janssenscope, a prototype microscope.
Tender love and chilling mob violence alternate in this engaging, disturbing period drama.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-915225-07-8
Page Count: 255
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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