A compelling wine tale that’s hampered by overzealous descriptions.
A girl is determined to preserve the legacy of her family’s winery in this debut historical novel.
The story opens in 1786 with 12-year-old Joliette de Verzat anticipating her first wine tasting with her grandmother. Joliette’s family presides over the Château de Verzat, a vineyard dating from 1515 that produces the finest wine in France. Her grandmother recognizes that the girl has an unequaled nose for wine and that should her father have a son who would inherit the estate, he would depend on Joliette’s astute instincts. Keen to preserve the legacy herself, Joliette is aware that should her grandmother and parents die before she marries, the estate will fall into the hands of a cousin. The narrative then turns to the tale of Henri Detré, a 13-year-old boy destined to be a tanner. Henri has two dreams: to meet his unknown father and to stow away on a ship headed for America. Civil unrest grumbles as the French Revolution beckons. Joliette strives for stability, but will marriage strip her of her independence? Meanwhile, Henri, neither a Royalist nor “a rioter,” makes a startling discovery about his father’s wealth and position. Borchert’s passionate tale is the first installment of the Château de Verzat series. The story is sufficiently multifaceted and open-ended to allow for further plot developments. The devotion of alternate chapters to the novel’s principal characters creates sustained intrigue as to how their lives may intertwine despite the denouement’s being somewhat predictable. The tale pays close attention to historical details—for instance, the author is aware that before 1802, Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville was called Place de Grève. Borchert’s writing strives to be sensually observant. At one point, Joliette relates: “I turned my back to the wind and sniffed. Another fruit, besides the grapes. I sniffed again. Peaches?” Unfortunately, the author’s approach is often excessively descriptive; for instance, her characters unnaturally perform multiple gestures in rapid, staccato succession, including in this passage about a friend of Henri’s: “The veins in his arms bulged as he fisted his hands….He raked his fingers through his hair, flicking water….He jerked his head up.” Despite this close observation, the author writes in short paragraphs that, although effervescent, rarely carry meaningful descriptive weight. Whereas the plot ticks along at an enjoyable pace, Borchert’s struggle to realistically animate the characters she creates becomes tedious.
A compelling wine tale that’s hampered by overzealous descriptions.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 463
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
© 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.
