A well-crafted and engaging SF tale about space exploration.
In this alternative-history novel, a NASA shuttle mission in trouble and its astronauts are stranded in space, waiting for a plan that will allow them to safely return home.
It’s 1989, and five hours after the space shuttle Intrepid has begun its milestone mission to deploy Odysseus, a billion-dollar solar probe, the crew members find a wing rupture on the vessel. While Odysseus takes off successfully—the first research probe launched from a polar orbit—the hole on the shuttle’s wing means the crew cannot get home unless mission control on Earth can quickly find a solution. The situation is further complicated by the failure of one of the shuttle’s communications systems. What follows is a story that showcases the media circus that accompanies the mission, the internal politics at NASA and within the American government, and an unexpected offer of help from Russia in the middle of the Cold War. The tale blends these elements with the complex dynamics between the astronauts trapped on the Intrepid—portrayed with an enjoyable touch of humor (“Yesterday I would have killed for a videotape of Ghostbusters, but things are going to get interesting very soon. I was getting bored”)—and a romantic storyline that centers on Capt. Stephen Hayes Bartlett and Dr. Catherine “Cat” Riley. Broadwell’s engrossing SF tale delivers an alternative history in which the 1986 Challenger mission was successful, emboldening NASA to run riskier operations. The narrative skillfully goes back and forth in time, from the months leading up to the shuttle’s launch to the dangerous mission, the rescue attempts (some of which lead to tragic consequences), and the aftermath. While the story breezily details the crew’s difficulties and the proposals to fix the shuttle, it focuses on the romantic relationship between Cat and Stephen with touching results.
A well-crafted and engaging SF tale about space exploration.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2023
ISBN: 979-8-9890680-0-5
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Cosmic Cajun Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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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