A well-researched but overstuffed tale about New York’s early Dutch settlers.
A historical novel follows the first Dutch family in New York City.
Adrienne Cuvillier begins keeping her diary at the age of 8. That year, most of the members of her family are killed when their house and wool carding workshop burns to the ground. Adrienne and her grandmother Mathilde are the only survivors, and they are forced to rely on the kindness of a cousin and his sons to take them in. Their native city of Valenciennes is caught up in the religious tensions that have swept the southern Netherlands since it came under the rule of Spain. Adrienne and her relatives are committed Reformists opposed to what they see as Roman Catholic encroachment. Young Adrienne soon takes a liking to her new, big family, especially her cousin Guillaume de la Vigne. When he gets older, Guillaume gets a job with the newly formed United Company of Merchants. In that capacity, he has the opportunity to join a voyage to the West Indies aboard the small ship Lookout, an otherworldly adventure that brings him into contact with the Native people on the far side of the ocean. He returns home with an itch to see more of the New World. Guillaume and Adrienne are married with two little girls when a new offer from the company comes through. He is to return to America, this time with his family, to settle at an undisclosed location and trade with the Natives. After their initial settlement proves inhospitable, Guillaume and his family end up on the more amenable island of Mannahatta. “In this paradise, when you hold me like this, I feel we are Adam and Eve in the garden,” Adrienne tells Guillaume as they sail down the Hudson. “Strange, though to see the Garden of Eden sliding past us like this.” Will their new home prove a true paradise, or will these hardy Dutch settlers find themselves quickly cast out?
Alley tackles an underdramatized period of American history: New Netherlands, from the early days of Manhattan to the obscure massacre at Swanendael in what is now Delaware. Her precise prose re-creates this lost world in convincing detail. Here, Guillaume records interactions from his initial voyage: “These natives say (as they point far to the west and southwest) lots of forest, lots of game and lots of pelts to trade. We traded one entire trunkful of our goods for half of our hold full of beaver and four handsome fox pelts as well as fifty thick, shiny, dark brown skins of a small animal I do not know.” The author has certainly done her research, but she appears to have been unwilling to leave any of it out of the 586-page tome. It’s clear that she cares about these characters, who are modeled on her own ancestors. But readers have no such affinity, and Alley never gives the players enough personality to win the audience over. The accompanying illustrations, uncredited rough sketches scanned from sheets of paper, add little to the work. Fans of early New York history will enjoy Adrienne and Guillaume’s tale, but readers of general historical fiction will likely feel a bit overloaded and underwhelmed.
A well-researched but overstuffed tale about New York’s early Dutch settlers.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 9798351541167
Page Count: 594
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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