Next book

JANE SEYMOUR, THE HAUNTED QUEEN

Deft, authoritative biographical fiction.

The brief reign of a reluctant queen.

In the third volume of her six-novel series on the unfortunate wives of Henry VIII, Weir (Anne Boleyn, A King’s Obsession, 2017, etc.) offers a dramatic and empathic portrait of Jane Seymour, horrified witness to the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn and to the “seismic changes...taking place in the English Church.” As a teenager, Jane pleads for permission to become a nun, much to her parents’ dismay: They want her to make an astute marriage that will propel the family up the social ladder. Although they eventually give in, Jane finally wavers in her commitment to the religious life; and at the age of 19, through the ministrations of a family friend, she leaves Wulfhall, the Seymour homestead, to become one of 30 maids of honor to Katherine of Aragon. Quiet, diffident, “whitely pale” (Weir speculates that she may have been anemic), Jane has little confidence that she will ever attract a suitor. She grows devoted to the maternal Katherine, despondent at Henry’s cruel treatment of the woman she insists is the only true queen. As Henry exiles Katherine to one residence and another, Jane stays with her until the maids of honor are drastically reduced and Jane is forced to attend Lady Anne at court. “I hate her and all she stands for!” Jane weeps. Much of the novel reprises events from the first two volumes: Katherine’s exile and death; Henry’s passionate determination to marry Anne; the birth of their only living child, Elizabeth; the stillbirths of 2 sons and miscarriage of another; and accusations of infidelity and treason that led to Anne’s beheading—a violent end that haunts Jane. Weir portrays Jane as determinedly virtuous, giving in to Henry’s passion only after she has fallen in love with him and is assured that he means to marry her. Historical sources persuade Weir that Jane was a “humane and sympathetic personality.” Henry ardently professes his adoration, overcome with joy when she produces the son he desperately desires. Weeks later, powerless to save her, he watches her die.

Deft, authoritative biographical fiction.

Pub Date: May 15, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-101-96654-9

Page Count: 576

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018

Categories:
Next book

THE NIGHTINGALE

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 17


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2019


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist


  • Pulitzer Prize Winner

Next book

THE NICKEL BOYS

Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 17


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2019


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist


  • Pulitzer Prize Winner

The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.

Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.

Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.

Pub Date: July 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019

Close Quickview