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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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