A forward-thinking innocent learns how to have it all in this absorbing love story.
A woman who’s ahead of her time struggles with her future in this historical romance novel by Baxter.
Georgiana “Georgie” Linfield, soon to turn 18, is quite distinctive from other English women her age, to her mother’s discontent. In this third volume of the author’s Linfield Ladies series, fledgling biologist Georgie’s dream is to travel abroad to satisfy her passion for natural history. But there's one significant barrier to this fantasy: Due to her older sister Harriet’s early marriage, Georgie’s coming-out season, during which she’ll be courted by eligible bachelors, gets moved up. She seeks the right type of husband: “The best thing she could do was find an indulgent husband who would not impose his will on her but rather give her the liberty to pursue her interests.” That description doesn’t fit Sir Giles Tavistock, the arrogant godson of her benefactor, Cousin Howard. Still, she agrees to illustrate Giles’s butterfly collection. As the two spend time together, their mutual attraction overwhelms her doubts—until Giles chooses to believe a nasty rumor circulating about Georgie. Georgie investigates another of her suitors, Pierre Alphonse, who is believed to be part of a conspiracy to free Napoleon from St. Helena. When Giles determines that the amateur sleuth is in peril, will he overcome his qualms and race to her rescue? The story is predictable: From the moment that Georgie and Giles meet at her father’s museum, it’s evident that the couple is going to end up together. The fun part is watching how that happens. Many of the obstacles that arise are the fault of the self-centered Georgie and Giles, who think the worst about others and aren’t terribly introspective. Georgie’s youth and naiveté further complicate matters. Still, it’s hard not to root for the spunky Georgie, who rails against the genteel norm for women in her era. The author effectively brings that time to life in her narrative with thorough research. The result is a work that’s both an engrossing love story and an involving period piece.
A forward-thinking innocent learns how to have it all in this absorbing love story.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9798985853087
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Vinspire Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2023
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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