An exciting, high-stakes story skillfully told.
In Pugnetti’s historical WWII novel, Bjorn Erliksen goes from being a quiet, solitary farmer to a tough commando in the Norwegian resistance force.
It seems possible in 1940 that the looming war will spare Norway. Then the Germans do show up, and Bjorn vows to defend his homeland. After a rocky start, he escapes to England to become a proper commando. This will be a scary, clandestine life. One of his contacts back home turns out to be Truni Sonnesen, an old love and an emotional complication. But they are a good team and manage to sabotage a fuel depot and to assassinate a Norwegian police officer–turned-Nazi in Bergen. At length, Bjorn is arrested. Does the Gestapo really know that he is part of the resistance, or are they guessing? It doesn’t matter because he is interrogated and brutally tortured for six months. He finds reserves of stoic bravery that he never imagined. It’s a credit to Pugnetti’s imagination and research that the reader may often forget this is largely fiction and that Bjorn and Truni and others are products of the author’s imagination. And although there are many other characters, he was wise to focus so strongly on Bjorn, making it a linear narrative. There are some great and gripping scenes, as when they ride out a fierce storm in the North Sea: “Winds whistled like a hot tea kettle, rattling the wheelhouse door and demanding to be let in.” The descriptions of torture and deprivation—such as eating salted herring, head, guts, and all—are almost too much to bear, and though we hear so much (and rightly) about the Greatest Generation, readers will still be awestruck at their bravery. An afterword separates fact and fiction, an interesting, helpful perspective.
An exciting, high-stakes story skillfully told.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73759-530-4
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Legacy House Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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