A steady-burning tale of unimaginable suffering.
In Bourgault’s historical novel, an orphanage is caught up in a dangerous political venture when the Catholic church gains power in Quebec.
In the so-called Great Darkness in Quebec (between 1944 and 1959), Sister Cassandra is known by the other nuns at the orphanage where she serves as dedicated, compassionate, and perhaps a bit idealistic. Her sincere care for the children in her charge and her quiet advocacy help her mentor four teens with whom she shares a special connection. However, the orphanage hides many dark doings, including an underground infant adoption program (that Cassandra assists in) that financially benefits the diocese. Troubles increase at a rapid rate after a great fire destroys the building and Premier Maurice Duplessis decides that it would be most profitable to rebuild the orphans’ former home as a mental institution, imposing torture and hard labor on the children and adults housed in the now iron-gated compound. Running parallel to this storyline is the future-set narrative of Cassandra after she has left the order and returned to the local priest, Father Marius Normand, to shed light on the horrors she witnessed (“I have been carrying a terrible sin in my heart for a very long time. I fear I may be beyond redemption, Father. If I don’t speak of it now, it will consume me and I will become truly lost”). Based on a real-life scandal, the novel’s compelling storyline is a quick and coherent read. Cassandra is the only character who is fully fleshed out; her thoughts, motives, and desires are completely made known to the reader (Bourgault does provide additional insights into the patients and other nuns as the story progresses). The narrative contains instances of sexual assault, harassment, gore, torture, and gruesome deaths. The lurid plot and rich historical details make for compelling reading—the slow revelations of the institution’s atrocities give the tale a dark, mysterious, and gothic feel.
A steady-burning tale of unimaginable suffering.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781038322494
Page Count: 366
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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