A tense and upsetting but ultimately uplifting historical drama that highlights the horrors of wartime survival.
In Scarlet’s historical novel, set during World War II, a teenage girl in Ukraine struggles to survive as she’s forced to work in a German household while hiding her Jewish identity.
It’s 1941, and 18-year-old Maria Furman is about to take her last final at school when the Nazis descend on her small town of Vinnytsia. After a classmate betrays her, she barely escapes with her life. A kind neighbor forges new papers for her, changing her listed nationality from “Jew” to “Ukrainian,” and christening her with the new name of Anna Ivanovna Furmanova. After she witnesses German soldiers slaughtering her friends and neighbors, she flees; now on her own,Maria quickly loses hope and vows to drown herself in a nearby river,but when she sees another girl named Lyuda attempting to do the same thing, they make a pact to stay alive together. The pair are eventually separated when Lyuda’s deteriorating health forces her into a hospital and Maria finds herself trapped working in a German household. Although she’s hidden her Jewish identity, she’s recognized by a former classmate who has a dangerous preoccupation with her, and could turn her in at any moment. Maria must learn how to fight for herself, and for the house’s other vulnerable girls, if she’s to survive and see Lyuda once again. Scarlet’s sweeping historical saga is loosely based on her grandmother’s own experience during the Second World War. Maria has horrific experiences, including a graphically described rape, other intermittent violence, and witnessing the corpses of murder victims. The prose can feel stilted at times, especially in dialogue (“I do not get headaches. I am a strong Aryan man. I do not get sick like some weakling,” says a German officer at one point). However, the story is so substantive and fast-paced that some readers may overlook such awkward moments. Overall, the author crafted a riveting account of one girl’s struggle to survive in unimaginable conditions.
A tense and upsetting but ultimately uplifting historical drama that highlights the horrors of wartime survival.Pub Date: May 8, 2025
ISBN: 9798992940404
Page Count: 454
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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