A wild, gripping ride through West Virginia’s past.
Laws offers a historical novel based on stories from her own family.
In the introduction, the author describes her background with the FBI and working as a private eye—and discusses the degree to which she stuck to the facts in telling the story of her birth family. Her attention to detail is clear in the ways in which she lays out the relationships within the Amoruso family, Italian immigrants “always one meal away from hunger.” They’re a family with nine children; the narrative focuses most closely on Tucker, Jal, Rose, and their mother, Margaret. In the first third of the novel, set in 1928, Laws sketches the aspiring Tucker, a wannabe lawyer engaged to the daughter of local aristocrats, and the unruly, independent, younger Jal, who has little interest in school or respect for the local Ku Klux Klan. Rose, meanwhile, “fashioned herself as a flapper. She was wild, boisterous, and deliciously disgraceful.” Also on the scene is the demonic-seeming Ernie Yost, an antisocial and embittered coal miner who slowly amasses occult literature and ritual objects, including The Gospel of Satan and a severed hand he keeps in a box in his basement. There’s a rather abrupt time jump to 1933, and then again to 1941, but from there the novel settles into longer groove through the 1940s as the central characters navigate the aftermath of early decisions, shifting family roles, and the mounting tension between private ambitions and social expectations. As the characters change and Ernie’s obsessions grow toward dark ends, Laws maintains a steady momentum. There is the occasional info dump or detail that rings true to life but is less narratively satisfying, and the prose can take on the overheated flavor of film noir: “She smoked ciggys and loco weed. She was a full-on boozehound and enjoyed French kissing.” This style also extends to the dialogue, with seemingly ordinary West Virginia women saying things like, “Don’t you want your honeybun to be a Cadillac?” Stylistic quibbles aside, this is a riveting true story with a shocking ending.
A wild, gripping ride through West Virginia’s past.Pub Date: March 14, 2018
ISBN: 9780996133531
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Stroud House Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2025
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
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
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