A dramatic tale that effectively blends maritime adventure with an exploration of justice and human resilience.
Wilson offers an American Civil War novel set on the high seas.
The conflict between the Union and the Confederacy is now in its third year, and social and economic costs are accumulating on both sides of the battlefront. As supply chain issues limit Union boat production and the Confederate government seizes private watercraft for the war effort, Sims & Gordon Shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, must shift its focus from boat manufacturing to ferrying loads for the Confederates. Alan Chambers, the anti-slavery head supervisor of Sims & Gordon, finds himself piloting the recently built Azaleaon her maiden voyage to her new owners in Glasgow. He soon realizes he has more than Union blockades in the waterways to worry about; when Confederate agent Tom Sable boards the ship on secret, official business, Chambers begins to suspect that something other than cotton is in the ship’s holds. Meanwhile, at home in Alabama, Chambers’ daughter, Josephine, and her maid, Anya, encounter a riot that suddenly turns violent, and Anya is abducted. Battling storms on and off the ship, Chambers and chief mate Hilt O’Callen must risk their lives and work fast to unravel a web of lies and deceit, before it’s too late for them and for Anya. Over the course of this historical survival story, the author offers insight into life during a tumultuous period. Wilson uses his experience as a career merchant mariner effectively, ably braiding technical naval details into the storyline: “The implementation of iron in ship construction brought with it a significant impact on the marine compass, as it could interfere with the compass’s internal magnets and cause it to deviate from a true reading.” This experience adds legitimacy to some of the more nuanced aspects of travel on international waters, allowing readers to trust the narrative and fully immerse themselves.
A dramatic tale that effectively blends maritime adventure with an exploration of justice and human resilience.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798998873010
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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