Best suited for devoted specialists, this earnest spiritual epic both overwhelms and illuminates.
Bien and Thurman’s historical novel offers a sprawling, mystical retelling of the Sixth Dalai Lama’s brief life, loves, and political entanglements.
This nearly thousand-page book follows the life of Tsangyang Gyatso, the Sixth Dalai Lama, from his reincarnation to his arrest and disappearance in the early 18th century. Beginning with an extended account of the Fifth Dalai Lama’s death and rebirth, the novel establishes itself as a sang wa’i namtar, or secret liberation story, in which spiritual lives are as important as outward actions. Born in the Himalayan town of Tawang, Tibet (today in India), and identified through dreams, omens, and ritual tests, Tsangyang is eventually taken to Lhasa and installed in the Potala Palace. (“Golden roofs glistened. White-sloped walls merged with mountains tapering to sky. Home!”) That Tibetan seat of power is still under construction and surrounded by political instability. The tale introduces readers to a large cast of regents, abbots, Mongol leaders, and Manchu emperors whose shifting alliances place Tibet (referred to as Böd) at the center of regional conflict. As Tsangyang matures, the story traces his uneasy relationship with monastic discipline, rejection of full clerical vows, and movement into secular life. His lyric love poems (and sex scenes) appear throughout the text, offering moments of emotional focus and release amid doctrinal and political discussions. Much of the action unfolds in monasteries, taverns, and pilgrimage sites as the Dalai Lama navigates pressures from Mongol patrons and Qing authorities. The final sections describe his removal from Lhasa under armed escort and present multiple, unresolved versions of his fate. As a historical novel, Bien and Thurman’s book is heavily researched and reverential. But extended meditative passages and explanatory digressions slow the plot, and certain anachronistic references to atoms and electricity poke holes in an otherwise skillfully woven historical tapestry. While readers familiar with Tibetan Buddhist history and biography may especially value the careful reconstruction of religious worldviews and poetic traditions, generalists may find the book’s density intimidating. Still, the novel’s ambition and scholarship are the foundations of its rich worldbuilding.
Best suited for devoted specialists, this earnest spiritual epic both overwhelms and illuminates.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781941312124
Page Count: 952
Publisher: Tibet House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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