Excellent, descriptive storytelling rooted in history and legend.
A novel explores the life of Lady Godiva and the tale of her famous ride through Coventry, England.
Godgyfu, a young woman who will eventually be known as Lady Godiva, is on her deathbed in Coventry in 1028. As she is being given last rites, she prays to St. Osburh, promising to dedicate her life to the holy figure if she survives. Later, in 1041, Godgyfu lives in Coventry and is married to Earl Leofric. She spends much of her time praising the Christian God and overseeing the construction of a new abbey for Benedictine monks. Godgyfu is also relentlessly pursued by Thomas, a Benedictine novice, who believes she is the manifestation of the pagan goddess Rhiannon. As she gets to know him, Godgyfu finds her sexual desire newly awakened by Thomas and falls in love with him. Leofric has also discovered a new sexual proclivity of his own that entails voyeurism and exhibitionism. When he catches Thomas spying on Godgyfu bathing one day, Leofric is offended—but it also ignites a spark inside him. The two men reach an agreement: Thomas is permitted to keep watching and meeting with Godgyfu. His mission is to show her the goddess within her, culminating in her fabled naked horse ride. In this swiftly paced tale, Cevasco deftly blends the Lady Godiva legend with Middle Ages history. This is particularly evidenced in Leofric’s dealings with the English monarchy as well as in the brutality highlighted in various scenes. Readers uninterested in medieval politics and Old English spellings will still find plenty to savor here. Thomas may be a slimeball cloaked in the attractive guise of goddess worship and herbalism, but moments between him and Godgyfu remain thrilling, mostly due to the overwhelming nature of her desire. Moreover, Godgyfu is an engaging, driven character who has no issues with expressing herself, whether encouraging her husband to speak to the king about taxes or being proactive in her lust for Thomas. Later, looking at Leofric, a world-weary Godgyfu comes to a sage realization: “She could not help but wonder why…she had ever felt she’d needed” men in her life “to make herself whole. She was stronger than any one of them and now thought of them all as sorry, almost laughable oafs.”
Excellent, descriptive storytelling rooted in history and legend.Pub Date: April 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-59021-714-6
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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