Think of the Bridgerton novels with the steamy sex replaced by female-forward action sequences.
Three interlinked stories that give their twin heroines a chance to shine in much more physically active roles than early-19th-century England would ever have allowed.
It seems the fate of 42-year-old spinster Lady Augusta Colebrook to be constantly called on to rescue other women from the clutches of evil men and male-dominated institutions, and the fate of her widowed twin sister, Lady Julia, to be swept along as her accomplice while they keep their snooty and entitled brother, the Earl of Duffield, ever in the dark. After a spirited prologue suggesting a lower-tech James Bond pre-credit sequence, “Till Death Do Us Part” is kicked off by a report from Georgina Randall, an old friend of the twins’ late mother, that Millicent Defray, one of her daughters, suspects Sir Reginald Thorne of having imprisoned his wife, Caroline, Millicent’s sister. Gussie’s plan to find and free Caroline brings her into close contact with Lord Evan Belford, back in England after having been transported to Australia for a fatal duel he fought 20 years ago. The sparks between the two are so quick and hot that it’s no surprise to see Lord Evan, aka Jonathan Hargate, return in “An Unseemly Cure” to help Gussie rescue Marie-Jean, a 12-year-old who’s been kidnapped, kept in a brothel, and offered as a Virgin Cure for the pox, or in “The Madness of Women,” in which Gussie eagerly responds to Lord Evan’s plea to help him spring his sister, Lady Hester Belford, from Bothwell House asylum. All three adventures are marked by successively mounting complications that fans of either the Regency period or take-no-prisoners feminism will cheer.
Think of the Bridgerton novels with the steamy sex replaced by female-forward action sequences.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780593440810
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
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