A riveting caper set against the backdrop of Europe’s darkest hours.
In this spy novel, when a teenager travels to a bustling port city, he has no idea that he’s about to contribute to one of the most important events of the 20th century.
It is June 1944, and Tommy Collins, the young son of a British naval officer, is headed home to Winchester from school. World War II is in full swing, and England is reeling from air raids, bombs, and food rations. Rumors are spreading that the Allies are about to invade Europe, and hours after Tommy arrives, his father is summoned to Southampton to assist with the war effort. Thanks to a lack of child care, Tommy tags along, making himself useful by running messages and helping out. Despite being warned of the dangers of wandering through town, Tommy cannot help himself. The port is full of boats, more than anyone has seen at one time, and the air is full of anticipation. During a walk, Tommy meets Annike Meier, a Dutch Jewish teenager who came to England on the Kindertransport. Annike is assembling a radio to contact her parents, and once it works, she makes a terrifying discovery: There are German spies in Southampton, communicating top-secret intelligence about the invasion. What follows is a rapid-fire story of two plucky teens whose dedication to the war effort finds them risking their lives to discover and stop the spies. Moss creates a gripping and lean story full of action and excitement. The characters are well formed; readers will feel Annike’s sadness and understand Tommy’s moral code. Even though the beginning of the tale features a great deal of exposition regarding the ravages of the war on England and the sacrifices many people have made, rarely do those moments feel didactic. Rather, the author deftly sets the scene of England in the throes of a war that feels endless. Once Annike discovers the German messages, the story unfolds at a brisk pace, barely taking a minute to breathe and leaving readers itching to reach the end.
A riveting caper set against the backdrop of Europe’s darkest hours.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 117
Publisher: Encelia Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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