A compelling story of love, war, and fierce family loyalty.
Borchert continues her Château de Verzat series with this historical novel set in the chaos of Napoleonic France.
This novel follows the central characters from the author’s previous series installments—Her Own Legacy (2022) and Her Own Revolution (2023)—into the later stages of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. The story begins in 1797, when the leadership of the French Republic is taxing landowners to pay for endless wars against European adversaries. They also issue decrees expelling aristocrats suspected of collaborating with the nation’s enemies and threatening those who remain with execution by guillotine. Overseeing the vineyards at Château de Verzat, a beautiful estate in the Loire Valley, Geneviève and Louis LaGarde use all of their skills to shield the land from government confiscation and to protect their aristocratic friends, siblings Joliette and Henri de Verzat, from the guillotine. To make matters worse, Henri’s wife, Aurélia, a former enslaved woman from the United States, is pursued and kidnapped by a lecherous slave trader who intends to sell her into servitude as a sex worker. “I lurched as it dawned on me that Aurélia had been sold and would be forced to have sex—with many men,” Geneviève thinks. “A vinegary taste filled my mouth.” Geneviève’s heroic but risky rescue efforts lead to her arrest, and she is imprisoned in squalid conditions while expecting her first child. This compels Louis to navigate France’s rapidly shifting politics and support Napoleon’s mad ambition for military glory in order to save his wife and friends from untold suffering. The path he chooses takes him far from France and exposes Geneviève to greater dangers as she tries to hold her young family together. This novel is well written and enjoyably paced—the chapters effectively alternate between the perspectives and experiences of the major characters. While the narrative stays true to the social mores of the French Revolutionary era, Borchert gives her readers powerful and active female characters who often cunningly use conventional gender expectations to conceal their real motives and actions. Fans of historical fiction will find this novel a most captivating read.
A compelling story of love, war, and fierce family loyalty.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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