A well-researched, honest, and grim portrayal of the effects of the Great War.
Tweeddale’s historical novel follows the real-life Drewe and Lutyens families of England from the famed Castle Drogo’s commission to the throes of World War I.
In the fall of 1910, renowned architect Edwin Lutyens receives a letter from Sir Julius Drewe commissioning him to design a castle for him on Dartmoor. Between his vocational travels to India, Lutyens works with his daughter Celia and apprentice engineer Peter Hall to design a castle that blends classical and modern styles. As the castle plans commence, however, both families are politically, emotionally, and financially embroiled in the movements of the time, with members offering myriad opinions, religious views, and political perspectives about the war and enlistment. The families work together through Castle Drogo’s stone-laying ceremony; before long, however, circumstances lead to Christian “Kit” Drewe, one of Julius’ three sons, moving to Vienna and becoming estranged from his father. Meanwhile, the Lutyens family becomes divided as the matriarch, Emily Lutyens, becomes devoted to Jiddu Krishnamurti and the theosophy movement, aiming to persuade her daughter Celia of theosophy’s merits, and eventually, the hawkish Order of the White Feather. Sir Julius gets involved with a scheme to transport war goods with his ships in the hope of continued wealth. Kit returns to England and faces pressure to enlist, while the eldest son, Adrian Drewe, balances his own desires with his father’s demands. Divided into 10 parts, attorney Tweeddale’s well-researched debut novel expertly balances complex personal and political dynamics before and during the Great War. The author effectively integrates artistry, ancient stories, legends, war journals, and letters that add historical accuracy and emotional honesty to the work. The setting descriptions mirror both the characters’ emotional states and the darkness of the times, which give the novel a sense of dimension. However, the abrupt ending feels anticlimactic and unsatisfying—even if it does emphasize the horrors of World War I—and that such devastation has the potential to repeat itself.
A well-researched, honest, and grim portrayal of the effects of the Great War.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781739612207
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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