An uneven but richly drawn story of a fighter and survivor.
Tyedmers’ historical novel paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of a woman struggling to secure her independence and find love.
When Sadie Walford checks into the elegant Queen Hotel in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1887, all is not well: The regular guest has arrived from New York City without her husband. The numerous trunks and suitcases in her wake suggest an indeterminate stay. She asks to be registered under the alias of Mrs. Wolson, but more troubling is her unusual and erratic demeanor (“This was not the charming and gregarious woman of years past”). So begins a Gilded Age drama that unfolds forward and backward through time, detailing Sadie’s remarkable resilience as she endures a strained marriage, motherhood, betrayal, and drug addiction, all while finding her artistic voice and light and life on the other side of her struggles. From lively boarding houses to stained glass studios, from the bustle of outdoor markets to the decorum of well-to-do brownstones, the deeply researched setting brings Sadie’s world to vivid, vibrant life. However, the protagonist’s tragic, romantic, and ultimately uplifting story is often stymied the book’s structural conceit—the author elects to convey the narrative from the points of view of at least a half dozen characters, a bold choice that unfortunately blunts the emotional arc of the book’s central character. Among the storytellers are Eleanor and Maggie, the bookkeeper and maid, respectively, at the Queen Hotel. Then there’s Jennie, a pickpocket. And there are the enigmatic figures of Sarah and Fred, whose identities and relationship to each other eventually form a vital core to the story. The novel simultaneously draws readers into its world but keeps them at a distance with its puzzle-piece, time-hopping approach. Still, the book’s heart is never in question, and the well-drawn characters, starting with Sadie herself, pull the reader over the occasional obstacles.
An uneven but richly drawn story of a fighter and survivor.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781069545701
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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