An inspirational, unlikely hero kicks off an impossible, at times repetitive, tale of innovation and its enemies.
Hultine presents the first installment in a historically rich series about a miraculous invention.
Elina Khan lives in Afghanistan with her father, Emal, in the 2000s, and things are not great in the Indus Valley. Drought conditions in the area have many people worried about simply surviving. Then there are fears of the Taliban, a group that’s willing to punish people for innocuous acts like playing chess. They are absolutely intolerant of the idea of education for women, yet American forces have managed to build a school for girls where Elina lives. Elina proves a sharp student and, with the help of an American doctor, she learns a lot. In time, Elina herself becomes a teacher. Things take a turn, however, when she gives a lesson on plate tectonics. As one unhappy student points out, “Miss Khan, earthquakes are caused by Allah, not cataclysmic events defined through theoretical means.” Out of safety concerns (a threatening note is delivered objecting to Elina’s “blasphemous” teachings), the school is closed, but Elina is not done learning or teaching. She recognizes that much of the world’s problems, and specifically Afghanistan’s problems, stem from issues around energy use. She comes up with a solution she calls “The Mining Option” and creates a flowchart to illustrate how it works. It is a modest beginning, but perhaps The Mining Option can change the world. The story of this industrious young woman is not without bloodshed; violence comes in the form of Kalashnikov-toting fighters and, in early chapters depicting ancient times, a tiger hunt. The action helps maintain momentum even as some information is repeated—the drought in Afghanistan and its effects are described multiple times, and it is perhaps unnecessary to point out that “even the wealthiest farmers in their valley were surely concerned about the drought.” But the compelling question remains as to what will happen to Elina and her flowchart; she developed an impressive idea under dire conditions, and perhaps there will be no stopping her.
An inspirational, unlikely hero kicks off an impossible, at times repetitive, tale of innovation and its enemies.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 119
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
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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