A bold, lyrical reimagining of the Joan of Arc story.
The Maid of Orleans rises from the trauma of war in Lombardi’s historical novel, the first in a series.
Domrémy, 1424: Most families have left this war-torn village, but not the Darcs, the wealthiest tenant farmers in the area. When English soldiers raid the town, the Darcs’ 12-year-old daughter Jehanne is brutally gang-raped. Afterward, she begins to experience otherworldly fits and visions: “Whispers fill her head, whispered voices of other girls, other boys, all pushed to the ground by soldiers and discarded in pieces. Some of the voices are not speaking French, the words thicker, more glottal, odd music of tones and angles.” After three years of these phenomena, the voices give her an assignment to join the army of the Dauphin—the heir to the throne—to help him unite all of France. Her relatives think Jehanne is mad. The girl was meant to be a nun, and the idea of her fighting in the army, much less turning the tide of the war, sounds ridiculous…at least until she reveals a supernatural ability to freeze enemy soldiers in their tracks. To serve the Dauphin, however, she will have to win over his mother-in-law, the so-called Queen of Jerusalem, Yolande of Aragon, who is a keen strategist in her own right. Together, they will try to halt the loss of French territory by lifting the English siege of Orleans. Lombardi’s interpretation of Jehanne captures both the surreality of religious mysticism and the madness-inducing violence of the period. Here, she describes a hallucinatory episode: “The braided voice loud now: screams within screams. Then: a waking dream blinds her, she can barely see the priests and lawyers in their nice robes. Instead: A lance crossing a chest, teasing under armor, then leaned into, until blood spurts. Dead eyes. A crossbow splits a liver.” Rooting Jehanne’s story in sexual trauma adds a disruptive dimension to this famous history, one that the reader will be intrigued to see developed in subsequent volumes.
A bold, lyrical reimagining of the Joan of Arc story.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 273
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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