A gracefully told story of the power of love.
In Baxter's historical novel, a lady, a lord, and his cousin have a chance encounter on a quiet country estate that changes their lives.
In the London countryside during the quiet Regency period, a fiery woman named Abigail Grantham visits her Uncle Longmore’s estate for a rare comet sighting. Her uncle, an accomplished astronomer, encourages his niece’s academic pursuits. After Abby arrives, she meets Lord William Rochvale, the other astronomer who will assist with charting the stars. Abby is struck by the Lord’s towering presence, and he by her beauty. As they get better acquainted, it becomes clear that they have much in common, and romantic tension begins to build. The burgeoning relationship is complicated, however, when the lord’s strikingly handsome cousin, Gerald Burnby, also becomes enamored with Abigail. The two men begin a rather polite war for her affections by accompanying her to historical sites, taking her on elaborate maze outings, and reciting poetry. Abby doesn’t know what to make of all the attention; she’s mainly focused on making an impact in the field of astronomy before she makes her debut in London society next year. Even so, Mr. Burnby’s charms draw her in, and Lord Rochvale’s steady countenance and humble intelligence gives her a feeling of security she never knew she needed. Their relationships become more complicated when speculation swirls about both men’s pasts and doubts arise about their intentions. Fans of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series are sure to enjoy this courtly drama, which effectively illuminates the difficulty of finding a mate in a time of propriety. The novel moves quickly, and the author expertly develops the characters and their intertwining lives along the way. The penultimate conflict, however, is rather dull, and although the author employs red herrings to keep things lively, the plot’s resolution is a bit too predictable. Still, the skillful writing makes up for this, and brings the characters to life: “she recognized, as always, how insignificant the ways of men were in comparison to the vastness of the firmament, where stars sang together in such joyful chorus.”
A gracefully told story of the power of love.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798866159451
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Dragonblade Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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