A rollicking wilderness epic that highlights the camaraderie and conflicts of Nouvelle France.
Bird’s historical novel chronicles the New World exploits of Louis XIV–era soldiers who establish a trading port called Detroit.
In 1680, 12-year-old Jean St. Aubin, from the French town of St. Aubin de Blaye, is eager to join the army upon hearing the stories of young visiting recruiter Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac. Cadillac signs off on St. Aubin’s enlistment papers but says the boy must wait a few years. Two years later, St. Aubin meets up with Cadillac again, this time in the company of a General Frontenac. By 1683, Jean is finally a soldier and is ordered to go to Nouvelle France, which will come to be called Canada. St. Aubin and his new soldier buddies endure a treacherous sea voyage, then, upon arrival, engage in many bloody skirmishes with internally warring Indigenous tribes, some supported by English forces. Many parties, including local clergy, seek to profit from trading routes. St. Aubin, Cadillac, and Gen. Frontenac converge again when Louis XIV taps the general to gain greater dominance in the region. Cadillac is granted a central role in setting up a strategic port in Detroit, with St. Aubin tasked with the dangerous mission of bringing Cadillac’s wife and others to this new outpost. Adventure abounds in this fast-paced, fascinating book by Detroit native Bird, which dramatizes the derring-do of historical figures St. Aubin, Cadillac, Frontenac, and others. St. Aubin in particular gets through many suspenseful ordeals, including stepping up as a ship navigator following mass casualties, fending off many wily tribal warrior attacks, and overseeing a fleet of canoes through rapids and over waterfalls. The author, who plans a follow-up book, also showcases the bonds formed by these intrepid soldiers, with wisecracks muttered during tense moments (“Kick him where his brains are if he starts to fall asleep”) and, by novel’s end, a vision of Detroit as a nexus of multicultural harmony.
Pub Date: July 8, 2023
ISBN: 9798850891718
Page Count: 594
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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