A powerful and affecting novel of the fight against antisemitism across the ages.
Ross presents a speculative novel with magical elements in which a woman discovers hidden stories of the past, including the horrors that Jewish people endured.
All over the United States, a government-sanctioned group that call themselves the Righteous are violently attacking Americans of Jewish descent and faith. A disturbing number of citizens believe that it’s been proven “once and for all the Holocaust never happened” and that present-day Jewish people are liars and manipulators. Rachel, who’s Jewish, is hidden away by her Christian husband, Henry, for her own safety; this became necessary after someone they thought was a family friend reported Rachel to the government for curating an exhibit of “homosexual nudes” at the art gallery that Henry owns. Meanwhile, Rachel’s son, David, is on the run after getting involved in a bombing plot with members of the Resistance. In the distant past, young Sariah and her family are Christian converts, though they practice their Jewish faith in secret to hide from the Inquisition. After the destruction of her family, she’s hidden away by family friends. Finally, there’s the story of Jakob, a young boy in 1939 who’s trying to survive the horrors of the Holocaust as he sees his friends and family destroyed and murdered one by one. Rachel finds that she’s tied to them all, not just by her heritage, but also by her connection to a cemetery that’s near her hideaway. In a novel with aspects of magical realism, the horrors that Jewish people have suffered sit side-by-side with a timely story of a modern society in which antisemitism is on the rise, resulting in an emotional and compelling tale. The chronological jumps are fairly easy to follow, although the fact that the book starts with Rachel already hidden away and then leaps backward in time only three pages later is somewhat jarring; so is the fact that same chapter switches points of view between multiple characters. However, the author’s style effectively smooths out as the book continues, and the characters and timelines become sharply distinct.
A powerful and affecting novel of the fight against antisemitism across the ages.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781639887422
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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