Instantly engrossing and compelling throughout.
Devecchi’s historical novel follows a young girl enduring fascist rule in WWII Italy.
Little Maria is gearing up for her first holy communion surrounded by the warmth of her large extended family. She loves Wonder Woman comic books, her dog, Val, and a boy named Gianni, whom she’s resolved to one day marry. The child feels adored and protected, but there’s a problem, and it’s a big one: Maria finds she can scarcely deliver her mother’s homemade tortellini to an aunt and uncle without occupying German troops robbing her on the road. The looming danger that Maria’s clan is facing is only beginning to ratchet up; soon, the fascists come down hard on the entire family in search of her AWOL uncle Alfonso. Devecchi’s narrative is as taut as the steel coils holding up a suspension bridge and practically vibrates with tension: “Ladies,” one of the Nazi monsters coos during an early exchange between the fascists and Maria’s family, “it has been said that one of your family members has returned after honorably serving in our prestigious military. It has been said that he perhaps forgot that the war is not yet over, that his service is still required.” The very real threat of quick and merciless violence could not feel any more palpable as two worlds collide—one wholly innocent, the other entirely evil. The narrative introduces an intriguing supernatural element with creatures slithering around in the woods; they have “Skin like a wall lizard, but shiny like an eel, like the ooze of an egg. Yellow-green eyes as cold as the devil’s with a tongue like a dagger.” The idea that Maria might actually ally with one of the creatures to help escape the fascists’ grasp is engaging but comes with its own dangers. Maria is warned to never give her name to one of the creatures, and to never name one them in return—but desperate times call for desperate measures. Has Maria—the adored piccolina—ventured too close to the void? Can innocence triumph over evil? Devecchi takes on the big questions and delivers, big-time.
Instantly engrossing and compelling throughout.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Wicked House Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2026
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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