An undemanding romance enlivened by an unconventional heroine.
A teacher must educate herself on matters of the heart after she bargains for her future with an ostracized duke.
When she learns that her friend Lucy needs her help, Artemis Jones quits her job at a finishing school and travels to London. While she hopes her presence will make Lucy’s experience of her first season more bearable, Artemis has an ulterior motive: She aspires to find a wealthy and progressive benefactor willing to fund her dream of opening a ladies’ college. And Artemis has another secret: In addition to being a teacher, she’s the author of a series of popular Gothic romance novels. Given her circumstances, Artemis is perhaps the least suitable candidate for Dominic Winters, the widowed duke of Dartmoor, who’s looking for a wife to give him an heir and help handle his teenage daughter, Celeste—but his task is complicated by rumors that he had a hand in his first wife’s death. When Dominic and Artemis find themselves inexorably attracted to one another, they hatch a plan: She will help him reach Celeste, and he will, in turn, fund her school. When the plan leads to a fake engagement and real emotional attachment, Artemis must decide if she trusts the duke enough with her secret identity, and her future. The first installment of the Byronic Book Club series is not only peppered with meaningful references to books by Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, but also borrows significantly from their aesthetic. As Artemis negotiates with a Byronic hero, windy moors, and the threat of ruin, she sets herself apart from the heroines who have inspired her with her fierce ambition and lack of inhibition. But even as Artemis emerges as a well-rounded, if slightly indecisive, character, Dominic seldom gets the opportunity to cast aside his solemnity. What Dominic and Artemis’ interactions lack in wit and humor, though, they make up for with heat and sexual chemistry, and their romance unfolds credibly in a skillfully woven plot.
An undemanding romance enlivened by an unconventional heroine.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72824-829-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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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