An engaging, elegantly narrated collection of tales that manages to make history feel personal.
In this collection of stories, an older King Edward I of England reminisces about the tragedies, loves, and battles that hardened him over the years.
The year is 1307, and the once formidable King Edward I is near death. He visits Marjory, the 11-year-old daughter of Scottish freedom fighter Robert the Bruce, in her cage at the Outer Court of Lanercost Priory in northern England. He has imprisoned her there as punishment for her father’s rebellion, but the two quickly form an odd sort of bond as he spends days regaling her with stories of his youth. Each of the collection’s 27 tales—beginning with the boyhood of the king’s father, Henry Plantagenet, in 1216 and concluding with a friend’s dire warning that Edward’s legacy is at stake if he continues pursuing the Scottish rebels—fills in pieces of the monarch’s personal and public life. From his deep love for Queen Eleanor to the brutal murder of his cousin Hal and Edward’s fatal flaw at the Battle of Lewes that resulted in a major setback in the bloody civil war led by Simon de Montfort, readers slowly discover what led to the king’s descent into cruelty—as well as Marjory’s eventual fate. Smith readily admits that her stories, while historically based, are largely fictional. This creative freedom results in a book that examines a dense swathe of history in an approachable way, sparking a mixture of both sympathy and repulsion for Edward. And even with the limited plot given to her in the frame story, the plucky Marjory manages to shine. While the prose can become dense in places, its vividness consistently brings history alive (“At night, the streets of London were extremely dangerous. Only rats, mongrels, and madmen dared to venture out alone”). The volume also includes helpful footnotes to explain unfamiliar terms. Smith ultimately presents a thoughtful examination of love, loyalty, and the legacies that mortals leave behind.
An engaging, elegantly narrated collection of tales that manages to make history feel personal.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798324489366
Page Count: 562
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
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
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