by Fiona Buckley ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2021
Pagan rituals combine with a thorny mystery and the ongoing adventures of the franchise mainstays.
A half sister to Queen Elizabeth I continues her life of deceit and danger.
Upon her return home from her latest adventure in 1586, Ursula Stannard is confronted by an unwanted visitor. Etheldreda Hope is afraid to return to her own village of Chenston in the New Forest, whose native inhabitants have treated her as a witch ever since her mule gave birth to a filly. Etheldreda’s account of strange goings-on in the woods, where the leader of the strange pagan rites—a man with antlers—has been speaking against an unnamed evil queen, brings Ursula to immediate attention. After consulting with Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, she departs with her loyal servants, Brockley and Dale, for the estate of Sir Henry Compton, near Chenston. Also with her is Mildred, a young woman recovering from a disastrous love affair. The village of Chenston is certainly odd, and its geographical isolation has kept its population inbred. The minister, Daniel Atbrigge, is little help, but he and the susceptible Mildred are instantly attracted to each other. When Brockley is taken ill, Ursula spies on a midnight meeting and is horrified to see villagers wearing masks and the horned leader sacrificing a goat and lying with a village virgin. After she reluctantly agrees to let Mildred marry Atbrigge, the filly is stolen, and only Brockley’s quick action on Lammas Eve saves the horse from becoming the next sacrifice. Despite the dangers, Ursula must continue to seek out any possible danger to the queen while Walsingham plots Mary Stuart’s downfall.
Pagan rituals combine with a thorny mystery and the ongoing adventures of the franchise mainstays.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-5050-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
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by Allison Pataki ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024
The author never finds her subject in this mostly lackluster account of a memorable literary figure.
A fictionalized take on the trailblazing life of 19th-century feminist Margaret Fuller.
Much has been written about Fuller, including a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography published in 2014. But Pataki believes Fuller still hasn’t gotten her due—especially in comparison to her male contemporaries. Hence this novel, which begins in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1836, when the 26-year-old Margaret—home-schooled by her father and highly educated for a woman of her time—first visits Ralph Waldo Emerson. Waldo, as he was known, becomes her great mentor and friend, and soon Margaret is keeping company with the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In this telling, Emerson and Hawthorne are wildly attracted to her—Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is thought to have been inspired by Fuller—but remain tied to their traditional wives. Though not exactly lonely, Margaret, who narrates her story, is portrayed as a woman alone, struggling with financial woes. Yet soon enough she is making a name for herself, leading groundbreaking conversation groups for women; editing The Dial, journal of the Transcendentalists; writing books; and working for social reform. After she signs on as a journalist for the New-York Tribune, editor Horace Greeley sends her to report from Europe as the first female foreign correspondent. Margaret eventually arrives in Italy to cover the country’s fight for independence and begins an affair with a Roman soldier, Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she has a baby. Despite these dramatic events, much of the novel is earnest and tame, the opposite of a page-turner. There’s a lot of clumsy exposition and literary name-dropping, with dialogue nowhere near as lively as the characters speaking it.
The author never finds her subject in this mostly lackluster account of a memorable literary figure.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593600238
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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by Allison Pataki and Owen Pataki
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2021
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
Awards & Accolades
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New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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