A captivating and skillfully constructed weaving of history and romantic drama.
A novel set in Harlem during the early 1960s explores competing factions in the civil rights movement.
Jason Tanner has just made a momentous decision. Sitting at a table in Atlanta’s Paschal’s Restaurant with the major leaders of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent protest campaign—including a young man named John Lewis, who would become a civil rights icon— Jason volunteers to set up a grassroots outreach storefront in New York City. His parents are not pleased that their eldest child, who had never stepped foot outside of Georgia until he joined King’s march on Washington, D.C., is heading up north to a city filled with danger. Meanwhile, in that very city, Anita Hopkins, born in Brooklyn, is attending a Malcolm X rally. “You don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution,” he intones. Anita cheers along with the crowd, handing out leaflets and encouraging his supporters. In September 1963, Jason boards the bus from Atlanta to New York. As passengers disembark at a Philadelphia rest stop, he strikes up a conversation with a beautiful young woman sitting across the aisle. And so the “do-gooder” Georgia boy meets the fiery, street-wise city girl. Their first encounter does not end well. Hill’s enjoyable, well-paced, and deftly structured novel, which features historical photographs, is filled with musical allusions, including a Christmas Motown spectacular at the Apollo Theater. Her descriptions of the sights, aromas, and tempo of Harlem—the ’60s Northern Black cultural and intellectual center—in all its diversity, are vivid and reflected through two strong, fully drawn protagonists. They are opposite sides of a coin—he is shy and uncertain about his future in New York; she is an exuberant poet with a beautiful voice. He is gentle, speaking in a soft Southern cadence; she is passionate and edgy. He is a pacifist; she is a militant. But the vibrancy of Harlem, the excitement of listening to Anita read her poetry at the B-Flat nightclub, and a magnetic connection that keeps each in the other’s thoughts eventually work their magic in this powerful tale.
A captivating and skillfully constructed weaving of history and romantic drama.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64063-829-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Sideways Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2020
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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