Atmospheric and entertaining, generously peppered with historical tidbits.
In Honegger’s historical novel, a young 18th-century Englishwoman visits the colonies and finds herself in sympathy with the colonists’ desire for freedom.
It is fall in 1777, and 19-year-old Mary Hannah André is restless, “tired of being nothing but a pretty doll, a flirtatious distraction for the men she [encounters] at parties.” Chafing against the constraints of English society and familial expectations that she find a suitable husband, Mary convinces her mother to let her journey to the colonies to visit her brother, John, a British officer stationed in Philadelphia. Once there, she begins to venture out on her own and observes the capricious and brutal British mistreatment of the colonists. One morning, following an argument with John, she rises early and dresses comfortably for a solitary ride into the countryside to sort out her thoughts. Thus begins an unanticipated adventure that will change her life. Lost during a snowstorm, she comes across a battlefield strewn with mutilated colonial bodies. She is then set upon by two Redcoat deserters, one of whom slashes her thigh while attempting to rape her. Fortunately, she is rescued by Major Benjamin Tallmadge, of the Second Continental Light Dragoons, and taken to the Continental Army camp, where she remains under Tallmadge’s protection, ultimately joining George Washington’s Culper Ring spy network. Honegger’s historical novel is both a love story and a tale of espionage, painting vivid portraits of high society in Philadelphia under British rule and of the harsh, impoverished conditions in the Continental Army encampments. Her prose carries the lilt of a romance novel—from time to time, she strays into such effusive metaphoric constructions as: “She breathed the words, chewing on them in her mouth before swallowing them into her memory.” Honegger’s fanciful, hypothetical version of Mary André—who, historically, was indeed the sister of Captain John André in King George’s army—is a spirited, engaging protagonist, bringing readers directly into the intriguing spy games and up close to the colonial luminaries of the day.
Atmospheric and entertaining, generously peppered with historical tidbits.Pub Date: July 4, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Quill and Flame
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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