An appealing pirate adventure.
The daughter of pirates reconnects with her past while investigating a diabolical scheme in this historical novel.
In 1829, no pirate is more feared than Katrina Mooney, known as the Scarlet Mistress. For years, Katrina and her husband, Capt. Eric Erasmus, have sailed their ship, The Red Witch, throughout the Caribbean with their daughter, Brandy. When a betrayal by first mate Don Lomoche leads to Eric’s death and the ship’s capture, Katrina places a curse on the vessel that only 15-year-old Brandy can break. Brandy and her uncle Skinner escape to Kingston, Jamaica, where she dyes her distinctive red hair black and he changes his name to Skynyrd. Fifteen years later they run a successful tavern called Katrina’s with a Chinese immigrant named Zhang Yong, an employee and musician, and Davonte, a waitress. Brandy believes she has left the pirate’s life behind her until she meets first mate John Edwards and the crew of the ship The Morning Star. After Edwards and Midshipman Ralphie Austin are attacked by a sailor named Faustin Reece, Brandy and Skynyrd discover that the culprit is connected to Lomoche. When Lomoche conspires with corrupt officials to expand the slave trade in the Caribbean, Brandy discovers the only way to stop him is through reclaiming her family legacy, a mission that grows complicated when she falls in love with the dashing Edwards. This latest novel from Hendrickson is a briskly paced work of historical fiction that seamlessly blends action and a love story. Brandy is an amiable hero whose romance with Edwards unfolds at a leisurely pace as she struggles with the question of whether to reveal her family history to him. Lomoche is an effective villain whose criminal activities lead to well-staged action sequences at the tale’s climax. That said, the dialogue reads like a summary of events. At one point, Austin tells Edwards after their assault: “They explained to the captain of the garrison what had happened earlier at Katrina’s with the one we now know is Faustin Reece. The garrison captain said he talked with one of those black-clad people he calls ‘The Night Watch.’ ”
An appealing pirate adventure.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73451-877-1
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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PERSPECTIVES
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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