Fans of period intrigue will delight in this highly adventurous tale.
In 1605, an English physician’s trip to the Far East has unforeseen repercussions.
Dr. Gabriel Taverner, who can’t resist the lure of the sea, sets sail on the merchant ship Luipaard. The trip could make him wealthy, but adventure is what he craves, and he gets that adventure when he finds out that the ship is headed for Japan, which has been visited by hardly any Europeans except the Portuguese. The ever-curious Gabriel is both fascinated and dismayed when he realizes the ship will stay in Japan a year or more. Romeu Silvestre, the Portuguese merchant they’re dealing with in a port town near Nagasaki, was married to the daughter of Aroto Tagauchi, a powerful man who’s whispered to own a magical tiger—perhaps made of gold—whose claws can turn into chrysanthemums. Silvestre’s wife died young, and their adult daughter, Chiyo, is unhappy with her grandfather’s plans for her; she secretly slips into Gabriel’s bed at night with plans of her own. Gabriel spends his days learning about Japan, and is entranced by the beauty of the land. The night before the Europeans finally depart, Natsu, one of Romeu’s servants, brings Gabriel a small wooden crate with urgent instructions to keep it secret and open it on board. The next day, as the ship is about to leave, Natsu delivers another bundle—and then the ship is attacked, and she’s killed. The speedy Luipaard escapes, but is dogged all the way back to England by Japanese ships, and Gabriel realizes why when he opens the packages. Things are also going badly back in England, where the doctor taking Gabriel’s place, who’s widely despised, is found murdered in a ditch. Slipping back into his native land, Gabriel relies on a friend to get safely home, and on his family and friends to protect him from ruthless opponents.
Fans of period intrigue will delight in this highly adventurous tale.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781448313006
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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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