An often compelling historical overview but an uneven drama.
Reynolds offers a novel set during the final decade of the battle for women’s suffrage in the United States.
One morning in May 1912, in the small town of Sycamore Falls, Kansas, Kathryn Wolfe is opening the Main Street Bookshop, which she co-owns with her friend Mary Dodd. Their book-display table features a new arrival: Women’s Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement. Kathryn and Mary are both dedicated suffragists, and they’re working with other women in town to organize an event in support of the Equal Suffrage Amendment to the state constitution, scheduled for a November vote. They meet under the guise of a women’s club dedicated to discussion of more “appropriate” subjects, such as “education, child labor, and library creation.” However, men in town form their own club to fight the amendment, and the community atmosphere becomes confrontational, especially during a July parade in which suffragists are met by hecklers. After Kansas voters approve the amendment, Kathryn, Mary, and her growing group of suffragists turn their attention to Washington, D.C., joining the March 1913 walk for voting rights during Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Reynolds parallels his primary narrative with Kathryn’s personal struggle: She was injured in a fall several years ago, which left her with a limp, and she’s determined to one day reach the summit of Sugar Loaf Hill. The author also effectively provides additional drama in a disturbing side plot about the marriage of one of Kathryn’s friends, which is scarred by infidelity and domestic violence. The overall character development is minimal, however, and the pace ambles a bit too casually. The most engaging section covers Kathryn’s yearlong participation in the picket line outside the White House fence, beginning in February 1917. Here, Reynolds’ prose becomes more impassioned as he describes the increasing violence the women faced; in November 1917, for instance, Kathryn is sentenced to two months in the Occoquan Workhouse, a hellhole where she is dragged, beaten, and handcuffed to a bar above her head: “Cries and moans echoed through the corridors into the night.”
An often compelling historical overview but an uneven drama.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73-509383-3
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Hadley Rille Books
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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