A worthy contribution to its genre, tailor-made for armchair Indiana Joneses.
In Burdick’s historical novel, the 1848California Gold Rush is the jumping-off point for many more death-defying adventures for young Bostonian Joshua Cabot.
Before the news of a gold strike gets out, a powerful Boston entrepreneur recruits 24-year-old Joshua to open an assay office in California, which he does. He also marries and has a child, but after a tragedy, he spirals downward, takes to drink, kills his boss (in self-defense), and wakes up an abductee aboard a merchant ship—the Pacifica, captained by a man named Mathius Stark. It heads north to Alaska, where mutineers have taken over the Russian outpost in Archangel (today’s Sitka), but Joshua and others turn the tables and make off with weapons and a fortune in tusk ivory. They sail to the South Sea, but not before foiling a mutinous plot and keelhauling the instigator. Then comes Lahaina in the Sandwich Islands, where he meets a desperate, sexually abused 16-year-oldgirl, Maka, who finds a way to join the Pacifica crew. At succeeding ports, they confront a wide range of villains; through it all, Joshua forms bonds with his crewmates, and by using his intelligence and skills—he knows medicine and metallurgy—he earns their respect. In the final scene, crewmembers head out to the dangerous hinterlands of China, and readers may want to remain onboard for a potential sequel. Some of the exploits in Burdick’s novel are so improbable that one may need to take them with a grain of salt or two, but the swashbuckling-adventure tropes in play effectively give the author a lot of leeway to pursue a tale of wilder circumstances. Overall, though, this isn’t a book to analyze, but rather one in which to lose oneself, as the prose is dense in detail and steeped in atmosphere (“Gradually, they felt the fury of the storm begin to lessen, and the sky went from an ominous night-like darkness, to light gray”). Indeed, readers will come away with the impression that this is a book by a writer who is clearly having fun.
A worthy contribution to its genre, tailor-made for armchair Indiana Joneses.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2024
ISBN: 9798873860265
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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