A royal tale enlivened by imaginative drama but burdened with excessive religiosity.
A historical novel based on the life and marriage of an uncrowned queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland during the 17th century.
Henriette-Marie, the youngest child of King Henri IV of France and his queen, Marie de Médicis, is just 15 when she marries King Charles I of England in 1625—just a month after he assumes the English throne following the death of King James. It’s taken a year of political negotiations with various royals and the Vatican to get a papal dispensation for a union between the Catholic princess and the Anglican king; however, as a Catholic, she’ll never have a coronation. Still, Henriette-Marie, who’s also known as “Henrietta Maria,” declares her advantages with considerable merriment: “I had many offers for my hand, since my dowry was generous. Moreover, I was comely, as princesses go, and it was known that I had a straight back, all my teeth, clear skin and was a nimble dancer.” With naïve romantic idealism and a conviction that she’ll eventually convert her husband and offer protection to persecuted Catholics, she sets sail for her new home across the English Channel. Vidal’s expansive tale—the first installment of a projected three-volume series devoted to the life of Henriette-Marie—offers palace intrigue, international conflict, and personal turmoil. But at its heart, it’s a poignant and often charming love story. The author’s extensive research has resulted in pages that brim with vivid descriptions of all things royal, including wardrobe minutiae, architecture, interior palace décor, and an abundance of servants—some who are devoutly loyal, others decidedly less so. The warmongering Duke of Buckingham, an influential favorite of the king, serves ably as the novel’s villain, as he poses threats to the kingdom as a whole and to the royal marriage in particular. However, the narrative pace slows considerably each time Vidal dwells on the young queen’s repetitious religious devotionals, complete with liturgical passages. It’s also quite challenging to keep track of the names, nicknames, and changing titles of the numerous secondary characters. Nonetheless, a final surprise should leave many readers smiling.
A royal tale enlivened by imaginative drama but burdened with excessive religiosity.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2021
ISBN: 979-8756784169
Page Count: 287
Publisher: Mayapple Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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