A brisk epic wrapped in a character-driven mystery that historical fiction fans will savor.
A Civil War puzzle perplexes a pair of museum archivists in this novel.
As in Steinmetz’s debut, Codename: Sob Story (2013), the author reaches back into America’s history in this work to spin a story bringing the past into vivid focus. Breanne Walker, a Pennsylvania archival preservationist with the Gettysburg National Military Park’s museum, is summoned one night to investigate a 150-year-old white oak “witness tree” suddenly struck by lightning in a freak summer storm. The tree once stood on the famous Civil War battleground but has now been toppled, and, within the exposed roots, Breanne and her boss, Greg Ransome, discover the human remains of a Confederate soldier and a tattered diary. Assigned by Greg to this confidential archival project, she breathlessly focuses on the historic journal, written in 1863 and with just the author’s identifying initials. The diary’s verbatim contents run alongside Breanne’s swift carbon dating and DNA analysis, and this combination sparks notes of mystery and tension. Breanne has a short amount of time to research the body and the book before media outlets demand answers. In addition, if controlling Gettysburg lead archivist Peggy Cupples discovers Breanne doing the Battle of Gettysburg work meant for her tier of command at the museum, she will lose her job. The intriguing diary serves as a comprehensive, heavily detailed origin story, relating the life of farmer and medical midwife Abigail Pritchard, who was caught in an arranged marriage. She lived on the property where the battle took place; the “oppressive and frightening” warfare erupted all around her. With dogged research and the aid of enigmatic dreams, Breanne quickly puts all the clues together and digs deep into historical Civil War data. Events become a lot more complex before Breanne realizes the politics involved in her investigation and the moral choice she must make as a result of her findings. Extensively researched, Steinmetz’s novel opens a window to the past and creates an intelligent and authentic character in Breanne. Embedded in her preservationist vocation is an immersive history lesson, spotlighting women’s roles in the Civil War. The author is a talented writer who is most proficient at fast-paced prose and a plot that fuses history with suspense.
A brisk epic wrapped in a character-driven mystery that historical fiction fans will savor.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63837-274-5
Page Count: 508
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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