A sophisticated but unsettling childhood mystery that appeals to both the head and heart.
A Canadian outdoorsman senses that he’s been reincarnated from an earlier age in this novel by Martin.
Martin (Taming Spirit, 2024) makes valiant attempts here to pull off a complex blend of historical fiction and psychological thriller. The novel begins in Alberta where Hartman Meyer, the oldest boy in a family of five, obsesses with exploring the lagoon that runs between his family’s farm and the neighbor’s property. When he travels the water, he looks for chert, a hard, opaque rock that the area’s first peoples used to make spearheads. He makes his own spears, but they can’t rival a genuine serrated spearhead that he finds—one that seems oddly familiar to him. In 1974, when Hartman turns 12, the wealthy Barrymore family moves in across from the Meyer farm. Like Hartman’s family, the Barrymore’s have three children, one of whom, Elizabeth, tickles Hartman’s fancy. But her older brother, Tyrone, is a bully. One day, while in a canoe in the lagoon, Tyrone slingshots lead balls at Hartman’s face and then paddles at full speed at him. Hartman holds his spear at the ready, and when the two boys connect, he drives it deep into Tyrone’s “soft belly” then pulls it out, and drops it into the lagoon. Hartman tells investigators it was the pole he used to push his raft that splintered and killed Tyrone by accident, but he knows it was murder, and he’s haunted by nightmares. Eventually, Elizabeth convinces him to go to a hypnotherapist to learn more about his nightmares, and then the book takes a dramatic shift back into the past. (Hartman’s therapist tells him he’s lived past lives.) Martin’s prose is elegant throughout and features well-developed characters and believable conversations. The author’s sense of humor also cuts through, such as when Hartman and his brother christen their watercraft “the Piss Cutter” and “relished the vulgarity that rolled off our tongues.” The descriptions of western Canada’s landscape will make readers want to pack their bags and head north. The therapy sections of the book also benefit from Martin’s many years as a psychotherapist.
A sophisticated but unsettling childhood mystery that appeals to both the head and heart.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798271562563
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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