A combination of fact and fiction that’s somewhat slow but often engaging.
A historical novel that explores the causes and repercussions of one of the most well-known tragedies of the 20th century.
Kate Royston is aboard the RMS Carpathiaruefully celebrating her 21st birthday, as she’s broke and fleeing a horrible, secret tragedy in a life she’s left behind her. Out for a nighttime stroll, she has a conversation with radio officer Harold Cottam about distress signals received from the RMS Titanicof the White Star Line. After changing course and proceeding to the scene of the sinking, the crew and passengers of the Carpathiahelp to rescue and care for more than 700 people who made it into lifeboats. Kate finds herself caring for the wealthy, well-connected widow Eva Trentham, who’s determined to force a U.S. Senate inquiry into the tragedy, with the hope of taking down J.P. Morgan, the ship’s de facto owner. Among the survivors is Danny McSorley, a radio operator who sets about helping Cottam manage the high volume of messages about survivors, but he too has secrets—not the least of which is how he managed to get a seat on a lifeboat, as he’s not a woman or child. Through Kate’s interactions and via the Senate inquiry, readers witness accounts from many other survivors, including immigrants in third-class accommodations; a few surviving officers, including second officer Charles Lightoller; White Star Line chairman Bruce Ismay; civilian passenger Jack Thayer, who now inherits his father’s fortune; and lookout Frederick Fleet. Many of the events leading up to, during, and immediately after the sinking of the Titanicwill be familiar to readers, as they’ve been well documented and portrayed onscreen. This book focuses on revealing key facts of the disaster through eyewitness accounts and official questioning that appear to be a mix of real-life sources and fictionalized dialogue. Hodgetts takes a highly familiar event and makes it fresh by weaving her own characters into the tapestry. The narrative is not as tight and briskly paced as readers might wish, however, due to the sheer volume of information included here.
A combination of fact and fiction that’s somewhat slow but often engaging.Pub Date: April 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-90320-0
Page Count: 363
Publisher: Emerge Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2021
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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