An engaging homefront war novel featuring a sturdy female protagonist.
Moyer’s historical novel charts love, loss, heartbreak, and new beginnings against the backdrop of bustling San Francisco during the latter years of World War II.
It is 1944, and 20-year-old Irene Mary Cleary, abandoned at the Mt. St. Joseph’s orphanage when she was but a week old, is the new proprietor of her own seamstress shop. The shop and its accompanying upstairs apartment were unexpectedly left to her by her recently deceased employer and mentor, Anna Orlova. On Saturday evenings, Irene and her best friend since childhood, Trixie Dubuque, volunteer as junior hostesses at the USO, where servicemen on leave are invited to relax for a few hours, dancing, playing pool, or simply enjoying refreshments in a safe environment. The war is creating its own set of homefront dramas in San Francisco, a city that is changing and growing by the day with the influx of sailors and entrepreneurs. Irene Cleary is about to find herself in the center of a complicated high-society quadrangle of love and betrayal that will threaten her reputation and burgeoning business enterprise. Moyer’s engaging and glossy melodrama bulges with colorful fabrics and elaborate clothing designs. The novel captures the unique beauty and diversity of San Francisco and its plethora of local attractions as the city navigates major wartime upheavals. Especially intriguing are the sections that detail Irene’s involvement in the costuming for the premiere of a ballet that had never been produced in its entirety in the United States: The Nutcracker, soon to become a holiday staple. Despite the novel’s indulgence in an abundance of emotional angst, Irene, Moyer’s likeable narrator, ably conveys her coming-of-age experiences in a voice that alternates between poignancy and exuberance, depicting her innocence, determination, and emerging independence (“A twenty-year-old woman with her own business doesn’t want to look any younger than she is, which was why I’d chosen my most sophisticated hat”).
An engaging homefront war novel featuring a sturdy female protagonist.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798896360186
Page Count: 344
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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