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
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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