A gripping, richly textured saga of the civil rights era.
A young girl searches for her roots in a city torn by racial conflict in this historical melodrama, part of the author’s Chicago trilogy.
Joseph’s novel centers on Pinkie, an 11-year-old girl who looks white enough to stick out like a sore thumb in Chicago’s West Side ghetto in the mid-1960s. She has been brought up there by Jolene Watkins, a Black woman who is not her mother and lets slip that Pinkie’s real name is Rachel Levine. Chaos engulfs Pinkie when policemen rough up neighborhood kids for opening a hydrant on a sweltering summer day, touching off a four-day riot fueled by rage over poverty, racism, and police brutality. Pinkie is taken in by Nizzie Sawhill, a canny Black precinct boss in Chicago’s Democratic Party machine. She also meets Mollie Hinton, a young white reporter covering the riots for the Chicago Associated Press bureau. Pinkie falls in with a sketchy Black reverend and civil rights activist Reverend Jared Levi Bivens, with pedophilic impulses. Nizzie further ratchets up tensions by telling Mollie and other reporters that there is a Black plot to stockpile weapons and start a race war. While chronicling public unrest, Mollie helps Pinkie in her quest to find her real mother. Joseph, who covered the 1966 Chicago riots for the Associated Press, weaves a colorful, gritty tapestry of the city, from the gorgeous Loop skyscrapers, to the dejected North Lawndale slum, to the grungy madhouse of the AP newsroom, with its scurrying copy boys and clacking teletypes. He conveys the city’s seething racial tensions in muscular, evocative prose and pitch-perfect dialogue (“Second night folks got pop-bottle gasoline bombs, what the guy on WVON calls Molotov cocktails. Now there’s less to steal, folks go to setting buildings on fire. Ain’t laughing so much neither. Some got signs Pigs Out! and Get Whitey! and Black Power!…Black Power. Got a good ring to it”). The result is an unforgettable portrait of a city burning with hatred and hope.
A gripping, richly textured saga of the civil rights era.Pub Date: July 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798990440913
Page Count: 300
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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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