An ingeniously constructed, if slightly uneven, historical page-turner.
One man’s escape from slavery irrevocably transforms the lives of two women in Friedland’s latest historical novel.
The author reimagines the lives of two important 19th-century Americans: Ann Phillips, a prominent Boston abolitionist, and Anthony Burns, who escaped slavery by sneaking aboard a ship to Boston. Their stories are intertwined with the narrative of fictional Southern belle Colette Randolph, who befriends Anthony in Richmond, Virginia, before his flight to the North. Both Ann and Colette are passionately against slavery, but the women’s anti-slavery efforts can only go so far. Ann is limited by her poor health, and Colette is hampered by her restrictive role as the wife of the man who founded one of Richmond’s most successful tobacco factories. Ann contributes to the abolitionist cause by writing speeches for her husband, Wendell, a prominent lecturer who champions the “enslaved, the downtrodden, the persecuted, at every opportunity.” After a chance meeting with Anthony, Colette surreptitiously gives him reading lessons before he flees to Boston. Anthony’s capture and prosecution under the Fugitive Slave Act ultimately transforms both women’s lives in monumental yet hidden ways. Friedland’s story of how these two very different women clandestinely help Anthony build a future also speaks to how important women were to the abolitionist movement. “History is a finicky friend,” Friedland writes, but there is nothing finicky about the impeccable research that forms the backbone of this novel. Evocative period detail abounds in Friedland’s work; characters are pulled directly from history. In addition to Ann and Anthony, Henry David Thoreau makes an appearance, and many other prominent figures come up in conversation. Colette, however, never springs to life as vividly as Ann or Anthony. Moreover, there is not enough interaction between Colette and Anthony in Richmond to believe that she eventually becomes “preoccupied about Anthony all the time.” By contrast, Ann and Wendell’s marriage contains all the minor annoyances of any contemporary long-term relationship. The nuanced depiction of Ann and Wendell’s marriage and Friedland’s atmospheric storytelling are enough to make the reader overlook these minor flaws.
An ingeniously constructed, if slightly uneven, historical page-turner.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9781684632145
Page Count: 328
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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