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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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