An original and captivating story that highlights the power of love and art.
In Pattern’s debut historical novel, a teenage boy flees the misery of his native village for Elizabethan London and finds both danger and a chance of renewal as a Shakespearean actor.
John runs away from home and from terrible abuse. He’s strikingly beautiful in appearance, and strangers repeatedly think that he’s a girl, and he sometimes seems to embrace this identity, although he identifies as a boy to others. John also sees a world that’s invisible to others—one populated by faeries and other creatures, including a hobgoblin who often accompanies him and appears to act as his protector. When he arrives in London, he quickly befriends Black Jack, a shiftless opportunist living in the margins of the city’s life. He sees John’s unusual beauty and innocence as a potential source of cash and secretly considers selling him into sexual enslavement. John trusts him, nonetheless, and leans on him to help him navigate the city he imagined as a magical refuge. He’s in search of a “Faerie Queene” who he believes will provide him with protection, but instead he discovers that England’s capital is a cold, frightening place. As he confesses to Black Jack: “London is not what I expected, dear friend. I thought it’d be faerie light, not more darkness and nightmares.” However, John eventually finds a sense of belonging in the theatre and starts to apprentice as an actor for William Shakespeare’s company at the Globe Theatre, training with his brother, Edmund.
Pattern’s tale is artfully bewildering; readers will likely be left a bit disoriented for much of the book, but they’ll also be immersed in its magnetic, offbeat nature. The protagonist’s sanity is often put into question as he seems to move from one fantastical realm to another—from the world of magical hallucination to one of creative imagination, from peculiar reverie to artistic drama—a shift that the author portrays with great subtlety and playfulness. Black Jack is just as complex a character, and Pattern chronicles Jack’s development without any lachrymose sentimentality; he’s shown to be a character fitfully and thoughtfully at odds with himself as his worldview becomes gradually changed. The city of London emerges as a messy and vertiginous combination of sheer possibility and relentless danger. Part of the nuance of the book is the ambiguity of Black Jack’s relation to John; it is often unclear if he is John’s protector or his enemy in a world full of perils that John has difficulty negotiating on his own. The interjection of Shakespeare into the plot at first seems like a gratuitous literary gimmick, but it turns out to be essential to the story, as the playwright’s own words are used to show how love and poetry can “transform the ordinary things that most people don’t even notice into things of terror and beauty.” Overall, this is a delightfully unusual novel that swings from the tender to the gruesome and back.
An original and captivating story that highlights the power of love and art.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-3949666025
Page Count: 241
Publisher: tRaum Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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