An addictive tale with drama, history, and delightful protagonists.
Jungle critters, diamond smugglers, murder, and three indomitable women propel this early-19th-century historical adventure.
It is 1809, one year after the entire Portuguese Royal Court escaped Napoleon’s army and relocated to Rio de Janeiro. The grand house of a viceroy has been turned into a temporary palace while Prince João, the heir apparent, builds his new royal home outside the city. Behind the palace is a convent that is home to the reigning monarch, Queen Maria I (the “Mad Queen”). Although the court’s arrival has brought new excitement to Rio, it has also resulted in unwelcome changes to the city that is home to Maria Azevedo, a free Black woman, and her younger, adopted sister, Isabel, an Indigenous Guarani. Maria is captain of a mule train that transports crates of gold from the mines in Minas Gerais to a bank in Rio. The team is waiting to register the gold at the Rio Customs office when two members of the Royal Guard harass the group (“They weren’t soldiers, and there was nothing royal about them”). Known as “Bats” because of their long, black, flapping coats, this violent, ad hoc police force was established to “civilize” the locals. The military intervenes, but the sisters’ trouble with the Bats has just begun. Later that evening, the sisters rescue a young woman under attack by a band of hoodlums, thus meeting Victoria Cruz, a Portuguese attendant to the queen. It is the beginning of a formidable friendship that adds extra intrigue to this high-octane escapade/thriller/murder mystery. Barineau’s Rio romp, packed with intriguing and occasionally disturbing historical tidbits, is lightened with a generous dose of humor. The racially and culturally diverse female protagonists are drawn vividly, with the portraits reflecting their unique personalities and abilities. Detail-oriented Maria is fiercely protective and a demon with her whip; spirited, impetuous Isabel, with her ever present assortment of knives secreted under her skirt, relishes a good fight; and the refined, initially timid Victoria turns out to be an expert with a sword. The author captures the sights, smells, sounds, and complicated social structure of Rio while maintaining a steady pace of well-scripted action scenes that, while over-the-top, are thoroughly enjoyable.
An addictive tale with drama, history, and delightful protagonists.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-949935-47-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Orange Blossom Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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