An enjoyable Victorian-style melodrama, although the story is slowed by logistical details.
An ex–Civil War soldier–turned-preacher aids a young woman in danger by marrying her, but their troubles aren’t over.
Waiting for the train that will take him to his new job as preacher, Capt. Harry Richardson encounters a young woman in danger. Sarah Franklin, a teacher, begs for his help in escaping her pursuers, who want to force her into a marriage arranged by her scheming guardian. Snowballing circumstances—the innocent girl’s plight, Harry’s sense of responsibility, the villains’ relentlessness, suggestions of darker crimes afoot—make an impromptu wedding seem the best solution to protect Sarah. It helps that Harry and Sarah share an instant attraction, and after a few probing questions for one another, Harry asks, “Will you marry me today on this train?” Harry’s friends, who had accompanied him to the station, get in on the act, and together, they organize an onboard wedding while dodging gunmen from town to town until they can see Harry and his new bride safely home. Using many elements from Victorian melodrama, Durbin’s debut novel handles characterizations well, with both heroes and villains being more than just cardboard cutouts. The camaraderie between Harry and his friends is believable and helps define his character while making Sarah’s trust more understandable; he’s the kind of man friends would do anything for. Durbin also complicates the plot in interesting ways beyond the forced marriage. It’s a shame, though, that the story frequently bogs down in long to-do lists: e.g., “I can take this load to the railroad, send that other telegram, drop the basket at the hotel tomorrow, and then make the return trip with that bunch from Choestoe.” The dialogue doesn’t sound especially Victorian, and some other details are off, such as a wealthy man being noted for habitually wearing a three-piece suit—common attire in 1875.
An enjoyable Victorian-style melodrama, although the story is slowed by logistical details.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1462732500
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CrossBooks Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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