A vividly rendered story of survival in the Arizona Territory, hampered by a tendency to ramble.
A single mother of four in the Arizona Territory strives for independence in Sweeney’s Western.
It’s 1899, and it’s no secret that Ruby Fortune shot her husband. After enduring his abuse for years, the “Girl Wonder” sharpshooter of the Wild West circus circuit struck back. In this novel by Sweeney, the author of Answer Creek (2020), freshly widowed Ruby wastes no time in ensuring that she’s provided for in the wake of her husband’s death, securing an inheritance by questionable means. With the help of friends in high and low places, she becomes the proprietor, cook, maid, and manager of the brand-new Jericho Inn, and begins a new life. Although her day-to-day life is quickly consumed by her new responsibilities, unsavory characters from Jericho and beyond darken Ruby’s doorstep, bringing with them the lawlessness, roguery, and tension readers expect from a Western. Ruby has little patience for the wheedling threats of locals who’ve had it in for her ever since she shot her spouse, and much less for those outside the community who pose dangers to herself and her family. She deals with each situation as it comes and does her best to mask the emotional toll it takes on her. Bursts of sudden, graphic violence, including in-depth descriptions of rape and domestic violence, seem to have few repercussions on the overall plot, which moves sluggishly through the Arizona heat. Still, despite the rough environment and frequent dangers, this novel is best understood as a slice-of-life story—a long, hard look at the experience of a woman making it on her own at a particular moment and place in time in American history. Fans of historical fiction and those with an interest in details of life in the Western territories will find it particularly engaging. Still, Sweeney spends so much time building atmosphere that she doesn’t give adequate attention to each theme, character, and subplot she introduces.
A vividly rendered story of survival in the Arizona Territory, hampered by a tendency to ramble.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-233-2
Page Count: 376
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2022
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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