A wonkish but rousing fantasia.
A female airship pilot battles an evil industrialist, a Prussian militarist, and a sexist society in this debut steampunk adventure.
In 1896, after Heinz Amstel, a German engineer and businessman in Joplin, Missouri, turns up dead—electrocuted and torn apart by coyotes—his widow, Evaline, known as “Evvy,” is left with a mountain of debt; custody of young Bettina, Heinz’s daughter by another woman; and the bankrupt remnants of Heinz’s airship company, which offers paying customers the best airborne experience that money can buy. She duly learns to fly the dirigibles herself, and she becomes famous when she pilots a group of Baptists and a newspaperman through a tornado to a safe landing. Unfortunately, Evvy is shadowed by minions of Prussian Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who claims that his stolen designs were the basis for the superairship that Heinz was secretly building, The Empress of the Clouds. She’s also stalked by Georgia tycoon Erasmus Marchand, who’s planning to fit Empress with a death ray and overthrow the government by zapping President William McKinley’s inauguration from the sky; his new regime, he says, will simultaneously reinstitute slavery and establish a Jewish national homeland in the United States. Evvy’s quest to thwart the various plots, assisted by chivalrous deputy Sean McTavish, leads her into ever more dangerous scrapes, all heading toward a rare dirigible dogfight. Ultican’s period fantasy is all about the newfangled gear. Evvy is a STEM-focused heroine who’s endlessly inquisitive about horseless carriages, electric dynamos, fluorescent goggles, and other marvels, forever flummoxing patronizing men with her knowledge and skill. The narrative sometimes drifts like a giant balloon, and the characters’ schemes and motivations aren’t always plausible. But Ultican’s straightforward prose makes the science and engineering interesting and the action scenes gripping: “The girders twisted and snapped, emitting unearthly high-pitched tones as heavy bolts and metal beams hurtled through the atmosphere, scattering the terrified onlookers who now desperately sought to escape.” Readers who love derring-do with charismatic, old-school technology will find this a diverting read.
A wonkish but rousing fantasia.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-65525-866-4
Page Count: 365
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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