An absorbing story of ordinary people trying to find their way.
Reeves’ 100-year saga follows an Italian clan’s travels and travails from the Old World to the New.
In World War I-era Italy, Anna Giove marries Vincenzo Desiderio, the scion of a prominent family in their little village. In 1922, Vincenzo sails to America to seek his fortune in the New World. After a period of years, Vincenzo, now a successful tailor in Philadelphia, sends for Anna. They have a daughter, Rosemarie, who marries Frank; they have three daughters, Kate being the eldest. The family members are haunted by the Catholic Church, both those who are in thrall to the institution and those who are trying (unsuccessfully) to break away. While Anna is timidly skeptical, her mother brings gifts to the friars in the monastery up on a mountain, convinced that she and they can somehow bribe God to spare Anna’s sister, who is dying from influenza. In the New World, Anna and Vincenzo’s (who now goes by Vincent) daughter, Rose, seems more attuned to relaxed American attitudes, but, in fact, despite her middle-class trappings, she is as deeply religious as her Italian grandmother. When her second daughter, Helen, gets pregnant out of wedlock, Rosa sends her away to have (and to give up) the baby, then makes up stories about how that daughter has a glamorous career in Hollywood. Rose’s brother, Vinnie, is a closeted gay man; by the convention of the time he is deemed a “confirmed bachelor.” These narratives are the saddest elements of this “novel in stories,” as Reeves describes the book. Even the more enlightened Kate is not untouched—but the novel’s last line assures the reader this is not a bad thing. Reeves is a successful published writer, as evidenced by the lyrical prose—here Kate struggles in spiritual confusion: “Overhead, a single bird’s insistent chirping sounds like heartbreak”; she finds succor in the “secret song of the ordinary that plays all around her.”
An absorbing story of ordinary people trying to find their way.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781737780861
Page Count: 172
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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