Emotionally dry, but historical fiction doesn’t get much better.
Historical fiction strives to restore the virtue of La Malinche, the infamous slave and confidante of Hernán Cortés, through an intimate coming-of-age tale.
At the beginning of the 16th century, the peoples of Latin America faced massive upheaval as Spanish conquistadors arrived to spread Christianity and claim the land’s fortune for themselves. The most noteworthy of these conquistadors was legendary Hernán Cortés, a man of many resources, though perhaps none greater than the multilingual slave and recent convert Marina. With her aid and council, Cortés and his fellow Spaniards were able to ally themselves with the Tlaxcalans to defeat the Aztecs; and with her love, Cortés fathered one of the first mestizos, a child of both European and Latin American descent. But before she was Marina, she was Malinalli, a Nahua girl from a well-to-do family, who, by the machinations of self-serving men, was sold into slavery. Only through her inquisitive spirit was she able overcome her hardships and learn the skills that made her invaluable to Cortés, establishing her as one of the most important—and often maligned—women in Mexican history. Heavily researched, Gordon’s (Voice of the Vanquished, 1995, etc.) narrative tackles Marina’s story with a distinctly contemporary voice, modernizing even the dialogue to make it both relevant and approachable and to more easily parallel present-day topics such as politics, family values, religion and gender roles. Despite this modernization, the tale doesn’t neglect the bygone cultures it portrays; instead, it highlights the nuances of the unique people, customs and languages Marina encounters. Though strong overall, the narrative has a few flaws: Some character developments feel rushed, especially Malinalli’s quick acceptance of Christianity, where perhaps complex emotion has been sacrificed for historical accuracy. Similarly, the text seems so intent on restoring honor to Marina that it greatly simplifies the struggle between her birth culture and the invading Spaniards’, which is particularly noticeable in the narrative’s less than robust criticism of colonialism. In Malinalli’s story, spiritual omens, Christian or otherwise, often feel Shakespearean in nature—befitting of the story’s emphasis on the joy and tragedy in the life of the controversial “mother of the new Mexican people.”
Emotionally dry, but historical fiction doesn’t get much better.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462064953
Page Count: 672
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2013
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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