A clotted exposition followed by a news flash: Nicholas fiddles while Russia burns.
Belfoure’s fourth architectural thriller features his most aristocratic and well-placed architect to date—and the fewest thrills.
Grand Prince Dimitri Sergeyevich Markhov is the best friend of Nicholas II, czar of Russia. Although he’s had many notable commissions, his latest—a request from the czar to design a Tchaikovsky Memorial—is the most high-profile of all, and he throws himself into the project with enthusiasm. In truth, Dimitri’s wife, Princess Lara Pavlovna, offers little distraction since she’s preoccupied with all the bedmates she’s juggling. And Dimitri’s own lover, Dr. Katya Alexandrovna Golitsyn, is an accomplished pianist almost as excited as he is over the Tchaikovsky Memorial. But readers who know anything about Russian history will recognize the troubled currents beneath the surface that Belfoure presents with an air of novel discovery. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904 has cut into the czar’s popularity. So has his police force’s decision to fire on demonstrators agitating for a constitutional monarchy or the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine—a goal Katya’s newly discovered Jewish heritage makes her embrace personally. The court is honeycombed with spies, informants, and traitors. And the public jubilation greeting the birth of Alexis, Czarina Alexandra’s fifth child and first son, is seriously muffled by the royal family’s realization that the czarevich suffers from life-threatening hemophilia, an illness that will eventually (spoiler alert) draw the family into a fatally intimate relationship with the monk Rasputin. No wonder the czar is the target of repeated assassination attempts, one of them involving a creation by peerless jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé. Whatever will become of Dimitri and Katya?
A clotted exposition followed by a news flash: Nicholas fiddles while Russia burns.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9086-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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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