An engaging, swashbuckling tale of love and revenge during the age of piracy.
A Barbadian fugitive joins a pirate crew in this historical romance.
It’s the dawn of the age of piracy. Dinny Obosi has grown up an enslaved person on a Barbados plantation, the daughter of a Black man and an Irishwoman. Seeing the way the master, Owen Craig, looks at her, Dinny’s father arranges for her and her twin brother, Jimmie, to escape to Jamaica aboard a pirate ship—though not quickly enough to save her from a traumatic rape. With the help of a Chinese-born sailor named Lei, the twins board the ship Hades. Lei is infatuated with Dinny at first sight, and she is likewise ensnared by the mysterious seaman and his not-so-humble origins: “Lei’s comeliness moved her in the way a sunset might, one with colors and patterns she had never seen before. Every aspect of him entranced her. His eyes, so lovely—of course, she had seen striking eyes before, but none seemed to really see her.” Meanwhile, in Jamaica, Dinny’s cousin Ami is haunted by the ghostly vision of a Huguenot family facing persecution in France. The family turns out to be a real one, and the two surviving brothers, Ivan and Pax Durfort, are in the process of indenturing themselves as servants to a captain in order to win passage to the Caribbean, where they will crash right into the Obosi family’s destiny. When Lei and the other pirates—who consider Dinny to be a “daughter to the Hades” and therefore under their protection—launch a vendetta against Owen, they awaken the wrath of the man’s father, the powerful Adm. David Craig. Dinny takes to the pirate life—and the pirate prince that rescued her—but can she survive in such a dangerous line of work? As she and the crew of the Hades make their way across the Caribbean, they discover a powder keg of enslaved people, indentured servants, maroons, and outlaws waiting to explode.
In this series opener, Little delivers in terms of high-seas adventure, evoking the period and settings with her detailed prose: “Sugarcane-mantled hills rose and fell beneath the clear night sky as the moon neared the end of its journey in the western sky. Dinny, Lei, and Jimmie paused after reassuring themselves that they had lost the slave catchers. They stood at the top edge of a sloping terrace overlooking the coastal plains.” While the rhythms of the plot will be familiar to readers of historical romance novels, the main characters—and Lei, in particular—are original in ways that set them apart from the standard figures that populate the genre. Part of it is the diversity of backgrounds: The author deftly foregrounds the ways race, class, gender, and sexual orientation operate in the time period. Events of the plot sometimes feel contrived, and the sex scenes are often a bit over-the-top—even for such a romantic environment—but the book is generally immersive and entertaining. Readers looking for a pirate-based romance featuring a more diverse set of characters will likely enjoy this offering and look forward to the sequel.
An engaging, swashbuckling tale of love and revenge during the age of piracy.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-944428-68-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Inklings Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.
The true story of Axis diplomats detained in the U.S. at the start of World War II is transformed into a dazzling historical novel set at a sumptuous West Virginia hotel.
Bestselling YA fantasy author Stiefvater’s adult debut introduces a writer whose prodigious imagination and distinctive prose style have combined to create a novel that will remind readers of why they fell in love with reading in the first place. At its center is the captivating June Hudson, an erstwhile Appalachian orphan who was taken in by the wealthy Gilfoyle family, owners of the Avallon Hotel & Spa, a high-society retreat built over underground mineral springs. At his death, the patriarch bequeathed ownership to his playboy son, Edgar, but made June the general manager, as she had spent her life learning the business—and also shared with Gilfoyle Sr. a rare gift relating to the “sweetwater” springs, a fantastical element of this otherwise realistic novel. Aside from the magical waters and a few other fanciful details, Stiefvater’s fictional world is based on extensive research into high-end hotels of the period, creating a version of luxury so appealing that readers will wish they could check into the Avallon and stay on indefinitely. In fact, the novel revolves around the true meaning of luxury. To June, it has nothing to do with wealth; it is more connected to joy, and to the book’s title: “June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury.” Also brilliantly managed is the rest of the ensemble cast: sexy FBI agents; June’s inimitable staff; the delegations of Japanese, Germans, and Italians detained at the hotel, some quite nasty, but among them a strange, special, totally silent child. And on top of all this, a delicious love story!
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593655504
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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