A funny, respectful sendup of the unpredictable responses to a widespread plague.
In this farcical novel, a 14th-century blacksmith searches for part of a holy relic that could stop the devastating Black Death.
A plague dubbed the Great Mortality sweeps through France in 1350. People in blacksmith Jake’s village take preventative measures, from isolating to waving hands in front of their faces (“to keep the bad air away”). Sadly, the plague strikes and kills many villagers. A local priest, certain that Jake, as a Mortality survivor, is “in God’s favor,” sends him on a quest. He’s to recover half of St. Ambrose’s toenail that someone stole two years ago. Surely making the toenail whole again will put an end to the plague. Jake heads to Montpellier to track down the priest who supposedly bought the relic from the thief. Along the way, he finds traveling companions: Cassandra, the pope’s No. 3, and Isaac, a Jewish chief financier. The trio meets a motley batch of folks touting shocking ways to fight the Mortality, including performing daily flagellations and murdering Jews, whom many blame for the plague. But as Jake and his friends soon learn, apparently nothing works. Lazris unmistakably lambastes reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic, which he openly discusses in his preface. His biggest targets, it seems, are those advocating anti-Asian hostility; in this book, people are convinced, without evidence, that Jews are poisoning wells. But even the most spiteful characters come across as absurd or silly in this surprisingly lighthearted, engaging comedy. At the same time, endless plague-centric conversations spark copious dialogue scenes without much action. Still, these provide much of the humor—for example, amusingly misplaced contemporary dialect and profanity. The author calls this a “3-D book”—12 songs he wrote accompany the chapters. He includes lyrics, and readers can listen to the folksy songs (performed by other artists) on his website or a streaming service.
A funny, respectful sendup of the unpredictable responses to a widespread plague.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66781-413-1
Page Count: 278
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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