A clunky but compelling society-adjacent historical romance.
A court musician is offered a fortune, but only if she finds a husband first.
Anya Marleigh is grateful to have more independence than most women, even if she’s a bit lonely. As a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, her primary role is to be available for “impromptu musical evenings.” Because she’s the illegitimate daughter of the late Earl of Beddington and his Indian mistress, she’s unlikely to marry, and with little contact with her family, one of her only acquaintances was the Dowager Countess Budleigh, until that lady’s recent passing. Then Anya is shocked to learn that she’s been left the bulk of the dowager’s considerable fortune, provided she marry before her 25th birthday, which is in just a few months. Along with this deadline, she’s assigned a trustee: Lord Damian Ashton, a Jamaican English gentleman who, like her, is not fully accepted in society. Damian and Anya have good reason to be suspicious of each other, and they get off on the wrong foot, although they can’t deny the sudden attraction between them. But with so much money at stake and the rest of the Budleigh family obsessed with claiming it, mysterious and troubling incidents begin to crop up in Anya’s life, putting her in danger even as she and Damian continue to explore their attraction. The second book in Murray’s Marleigh Sisters series can stand alone, and has many intriguing elements, but unfortunately, the plot is often undermined by clunky writing and uneven pacing. In addition, though the chemistry between Anya and Damian is considerable (and spicy), their connection makes the misunderstandings that come between them hard to understand. Despite this, the book is effective, as Anya and Damian’s love story explores the relationship between family and love from several different perspectives, as well as the impact of the British Empire on those caught between London and its many colonies. Healthy dashes of witty dialogue and complex characterization do much to keep the story engaging, and there’s a lot to be enjoyed by historical romance readers looking for a new approach to beloved tropes.
A clunky but compelling society-adjacent historical romance.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780063296527
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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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