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
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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