A family saga light on personal interactions but filled with historical nuggets.
Wiens’ novel, the first of a two-volume series, offers a fictionalized history of his Mennonite family, from the 19th century in Russian Ukraine to their arrival in America in 1922.
In 1894, 7-year-old Gerhardt Wiens is on a ship with his parents and siblings heading back to Europe. Although happy with his American life in a Mennonite community in Kansas, Gerhardt is nonetheless excited about this new adventure, which will bring him to his homeland in southern Ukraine. His father, Heinrich, has grown disillusioned with what he sees as the chaos of American culture, where strikers can stop rail travel and the government changes every few years. “America is too politically unstable and will probably come to another revolution,” he tells his sons. “We’ll be better off back in Russia where it’s peaceful, stable, and safe.” Little does he anticipate the turmoil that will bring havoc to his family over the coming decades. The Wiens family are prosperous farmers, and Heinrich increases his holdings during the first decade of the 20th century. In 1910, Gerhardt decides it’s time to marry, have children, and become a landowner in his own right. Shortly after his wedding, he sets out for southern Siberia and purchases farming land in Kazakhstan. When World War I erupts, everything changes. Originally exempt from military service on religious grounds, Gerhardt is drafted into the ambulance corps—then comes the Russian Revolution. Gerhardt and his family are the center of the narrative, but the presentation of their individual sagas is more factual than emotional in tone. The drama in the story rests in the gritty details of the world war on the Eastern Front, with its massive losses of troops and military disorganization, both leading to dissension in the ranks, followed by years of violence in which competing factions of communist revolutionaries battle for control of the empire. More uplifting are the sections that portray the kaleidoscope of nationalities, ethnicities, and cultural traditions that co-existed—occasionally amicably, other times less so—in what was the Russian Empire.
A family saga light on personal interactions but filled with historical nuggets.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9798987879627
Page Count: 268
Publisher: H.P. Waterhouse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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