A noble and ambitious attempt to fuse genre pastiche with queer narratives but one that sometimes fails to connect its...
A young man in 18th-century Britain successively falls for, and must choose between, three different men in this debut historical novel.
Charming, fashionable, erudite, and gay Englishman Hugh Entwistle is portrayed as an ideal man of the 18th century in this novel, which is, in part, an homage to coming-of-age novels of the era in which it’s set, such as Henry Fielding’s 1749 classic Tom Jones. It’s also a work of queer historical archiving that’s as admirable and remarkable as its hero. The preface sets up the conceit that the novel is a period document, a fiction penned by the author’s ancestor about a gay hero; the setup is a great authorly salute to similar openings from past classics, in which the author claims to have stumbled upon a “rusted trunk” with “no lock,” and, lo and behold, the manuscript is found. Novelist Lawrence continues this ruse with fidelity, writing in a facsimile Georgian style, which is the novel’s great achievement and, at times, its great pitfall. Juicy, “Dear Reader” asides establish an air of close confidence as the novel explores the secret gay romances of Hugh and his suitors—the alliterative trio of Bramble, Benjamin, and Brent. Yet there’s a degree to which the style, and the plot itself, get a bit confusing. Scaffolding the novel, as if to mirror the life of the protagonist, is a political history of the radical parliamentarian John Wilkes, which doesn’t seamlessly combine with the story of Hugh’s courting and being courted; likewise, period details of aesthetic philosophy, and particularly philosopher Edmund Burke’s writing on the “sublime,” feel overwrought and even somewhat haughty. More frustrating is the fact that sublime is too narrowly defined as “pleasure at the relief from Pain,” which doesn’t quite capture the scope of Burke’s imagination. Nonetheless, the developing, homoerotic love stories, a snappy courtroom scene, and a delightful final image tilt the scales of the novel closer to pleasure than pain.
A noble and ambitious attempt to fuse genre pastiche with queer narratives but one that sometimes fails to connect its disparate details.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Broadbound Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2021
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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