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
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
The lives of vividly drawn characters illuminate a lesser-known part of 20th-century history.
This engrossing historical novel focuses on the lives of three Black Americans in the aftermath of World War II.
In 1948, Ozzie Philips is a newly enlisted young soldier from Philadelphia who arrives at his station in occupied Germany just in time for the order by President Harry Truman desegregating the U.S. military. It’s inspiring news, but Ozzie will find it’s a rough transition. In 1950, Ethel Gathers is a journalist and the wife of a U.S. Army officer posted to Mannheim in occupied Germany. Unhappily childless, one day she sees a group of young biracial children tended by nuns and ends up volunteering at their orphanage. When Ethel discovers thousands of these children, born as the result of relationships between American soldiers and German women, she’s fired with purpose. In 1965 in Maryland, Sophia Clark is the ambitious teenage daughter of a hardworking farm family. When she’s unexpectedly selected for a scholarship to a fancy boarding school, she’s eager for the opportunity, if unprepared for what she’ll face as one of the first Black students to attend. The novel traces each character’s life in separate chapters, eventually revealing the connections among them. Their stories are firmly grounded in meticulous research, from the current events of each period down to details of clothing styles. Ozzie copes with the infuriating indignities imposed on “colored” soldiers despite their essential contributions, and Ethel and Sophia each learn to navigate arcane hierarchies—for Ethel, the scorekeeping of military wives and the barriers of bureaucracy, and for Sophia, the perils of boarding school. Their individual experiences are all part of the larger historical force of World War II and its influence on the Civil Rights Movement. At some points the dialogue can be stilted in its efforts to convey history, but the characters and rich details are warmly engaging.
The lives of vividly drawn characters illuminate a lesser-known part of 20th-century history.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781668069912
Page Count: 464
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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