A dense, deeply emotional, and often disturbing historical drama.
Vines presents a historical drama of a strong-willed Irish prisoner at sea in the 18th century.
In Protestant-ascendant Ireland in 1792, young and beautiful Elizabeth’s parents send her away to a manor in the Irish countryside to work as a housemaid. She soon suffers sexual abuse at the hands of the men in the wealthy household. All that sustains her is her love for Michael, a stable boy who shows her only a semblance of tenderness but is nonetheless willing to spurn her after he finds out about the abuse she suffers. When Elizabeth is swept up in a seemingly random mass arrest and sentenced to seven years in the penal colony of New South Wales, she must contend with the bleakness before her—a future that diverges into two different, devastating paths: either monthslong claustrophobia in the ship’s dismal hull or sexual exploitation by one of the ship’s crew in exchange for material comforts. Elizabeth soon finds herself drawing the interest of the ship’s captain, and what ensues is a meticulous account of one woman’s efforts toward self-preservation, an unending parlay with guilt and shame. Vines carefully renders Elizabeth's persistent horror throughout the narrative; at one point, she expresses a fear that she will never marry and instead “become one of the others, the bad women, the lost women, lost both in this world and the next.” The novel is deeply concerned with microscopic facets of its environment, which can feel prosaic at times; it also features nonconsensual sex scenes that may disturb many readers. However, Elizabeth’s internal conflicts as she navigates her relationships with those who exploit her body remain deeply felt, with many relatable passages: “It shocked her that she would settle for anyone rather than no one, and that she would use this need for her benefit.”
A dense, deeply emotional, and often disturbing historical drama.Pub Date: April 21, 2023
ISBN: 978-1922830241
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Glass House Books
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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