An often powerful tale of steadfastness in the face of adversity.
A family faces a tragedy that plunges them deep into the unimaginable trials of the Great Depression in this work of Christian historical fiction by Smith, author of The Invisible Cipher (2015).
Ten-year-old Eleanor Cruthers feels responsible for a tragic fire that burned down her family’s log home in rural Idaho. With the country in the depths of economic turmoil. Eleanor’s father packs up all that remains of their life and moves her, her mother, and her three siblings to the city of Spokane, Washington, in the hope of finding work. The family’s hopeful temperament and appetite for adventure are quickly curbed as they encounter myriad adversities; they end up living among a collection of shanties built by their residents on the outskirts of town. Industrious and determined Eleanor does whatever she can to help her family survive, including suggesting that the family raise chickens, but as winter approaches, their hardship continues to grow. Indeed, the child and her family are left wondering if God actually does help those who help themselves. It isn’t until Eleanor’s father stumbles upon a church in a different neighborhood that things begin looking up for the Cruthers family. Still, as they deal with potentially life-threatening problems, the family finds it nearly impossible to forgive people who’ve done them very wrong. The novel is full of heartwarming scenes of a tightknit family who lean on one another when the world seems set against them, and the work strongly emphasizes themes of forgiveness and generosity. Explorations of biblical quotations intertwine with accounts of human failings as Eleanor and her family struggle for survival and try to come to terms with their impoverishment. Certain passages over the course of the story come across as overly aphoristic, particularly during sermons. However, the overall effect of the narrative is uplifting and true to the characters’ struggles.
An often powerful tale of steadfastness in the face of adversity.Pub Date: June 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9976530-4-5
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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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