An engaging romantic tale that also calls for equality.
An American student at the University of Oxford in 1919 falls in love with a dynamic women’s rights activist in this debut novel.
Amelia Cole, called Lia by her friends, is the daughter of immigrant restaurateurs in Brooklyn. Young and somewhat unsure of herself, she boards a ship for England and becomes one of the first women to study at Oxford. She stays with a couple called the Watsons in the quiet, upscale enclave of Spindly Oaks, where Lia is concerned that Mr. Watson may have a drinking problem. On her way to class, Lia runs into an effervescent student named Scarlett Daniels. Lia thinks she is like a movie star: beautiful, posh, and concerned about women’s rights at Oxford. A group has formed on campus that is fighting for women to be able to matriculate along with the men. Scarlett urges Lia to join the band, thinking (correctly) that administrators will listen to an outside American voice. Entranced by the group’s secret home, a cabin called Wonderland, Lia finds herself joining the cause and falling in love with her new friend. Scarlett is similarly inclined, and the budding romance evolves into a passionate affair, complete with a glamorous Christmas trip to London. But Scarlett abruptly ends the relationship, fearing the world won’t accept a lesbian couple. A distraught Lia leaves Oxford early and enrolls at New York University. As the years roll by, Scarlett becomes a well-known actress, and Lia turns into a pioneering woman in journalism. Still, Lia has never truly given up on Scarlett. As the action moves to the 1940s, Lia follows the actress to Hong Kong in one final bid to secure her love. Wong’s novel succeeds in creating congenial characters with an undying commitment to women’s liberation in education, careers, and relationships, particularly those bonds that are stigmatized. But with only vague, passing references to Lia’s career and obvious details about the various time periods, the story works best as a romance. The on-again, off-again dynamics of Lia and Scarlett’s relationship are convincingly described, and the added pressures of a same-sex bond in a hostile time period resonate very well. The prose is spare though somewhat plain (“Divorce was a big deal”). The years fly by quickly, but the emotion of the book flows toward a moving conclusion.
An engaging romantic tale that also calls for equality.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-284-0
Page Count: 220
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
