A sharp but not quite successful tale about entrenched powers in the Jim Crow South.
A Southern newspaper reporter discovers the lies undergirding the Lost Cause of the Confederacy in this debut historical novel.
South Carolina, 1936. Journalist Betsy McCall is hoping to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization dedicated to honoring the valiant deeds of Rebel soldiers in the Civil War. Unfortunately for Betsy, the letter she brings as proof of her family’s involvement casts the Confederate soldiers in an unflattering light, and the women of the UDC eject her from the meeting. A colleague at Betsy’s newspaper isn’t surprised. Vernon Covington has long made trouble for the local powers that be, particularly regarding labor disputes. “Those people have their own version of what the truth is,” Vernon tells Betsy. “If you want to see what they’re like, go through those old newspapers the original owners wrote about the Civil War.” With dusty articles and Vernon as her guide, Betsy unearths just how the history of the South has been shaped in the preceding 70 years to distort the truth of the Confederate cause. In the process, Betsy uncovers the facts relating to the tragic death of her aunt Mildred Turnage, who led a strike against the owners of the local textile mill. At its best, Pate’s prose is funny and psychologically insightful, as here when Betsy stews over her rejection by the UDC: “Her thoughts permanently set on standby; ready to record and play back every slight, big or small. It ran in a never-ending loop of see, you’re not good enough that she could never shut off. Then she’d get mad at herself for thinking that way.” Unfortunately, the pointed novel is propelled more by its politics than by the internal lives or motivations of its characters. Betsy and Vernon become a frame narrative for smaller stories stretching back to the Civil War era, and while some of them are entertaining, their didactic function outweighs any real sense of verisimilitude. The book also feels long at nearly 400 pages, particularly because its structure impedes the narrative’s momentum.
A sharp but not quite successful tale about entrenched powers in the Jim Crow South.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-955119-27-6
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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