Penfield starts the series off well in this installment, and later volumes may be just as rewarding.
In 17th-century France, a Huguenot family fights for their livelihood—and their lives—under the repressive reign of King Louis XIV.
Clare Dupres comes from a long line of midwives. Proud of her expertise, she intends to pass it and its secrets on to her daughter, Lucina. Although Clare is in love with her impulsive cousin Pierre Dupres, she eventually marries his older, steadier brother, Jacques, who inherits the lucrative family business, which deals in designer silk fabric. All is going well until the tide begins to turn against the Huguenots in France; the Edict of Nantes had established a kind of truce between this Protestant sect and the Catholic Church, but the new monarch, King Louis XIV, is determined to stamp out what he sees as its heresy. Eventually, it becomes very dangerous to be a Huguenot, and Clare plans her family’s escape to England, where Pierre is marrying into a rich family and has a home waiting for them. As they are pursued by a contingent of soldiers led by the brutish and lecherous Capitaine Robert Souchard, it looks very bad for the Dupres. However, Clare is indomitable, and she has more than one trick up her sleeve. After several hairbreadth escapes, the story proceeds to a rip-roaring conclusion as an armed merchant ship from England pushes off from the pier in Dieppe. Over the course of this novel, Penfield shows a talent for storytelling and a clear knack for drama, although some may feel that it tips into melodrama at times (or sappiness, as in scenes featuring the cutesy Jean-Pierre Dupres, Clare and Jacques’ young son). She also delivers a truly nasty young villain in the maidservant Giselle—a lazy and crafty young woman who has a desire to betray the Dupres, who’ve reluctantly taken her in—and offers a wonderfully drawn pious lech in Père Benedict.
Penfield starts the series off well in this installment, and later volumes may be just as rewarding.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2021
ISBN: 9781737807919
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Sycamore Lane Press
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2023
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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