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
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
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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