Patient, perceptive, and charged with a quiet emotional power.
In Bender’s historical novel, a sensitive girl awakens to her spiritual gifts in late-19th-century New York.
In 1896 13-year-old Ambrétte Memenon, the daughter of French immigrants, is newly arrived in Utica, New York, and resides in the first residential home in the city to get electricity. Her father, referred to as Papa, is an electrical scientist who has worked with some of the greatest minds of his generation, including Nicola Tesla. Her mother, called Maman, believes in spiritualism—she’s convinced that “spirits live around us, just as neighbors do. The dead are near us at all times.” Ambrétte’s older brother, Georges, works alongside their father and is gradually maturing into adulthood. Ambrétte feels disconnected from her surroundings and senses a deep rift between her parents—in a recurring metaphor that draws upon her parents’ interests in electricity and spiritualism, she longs to be the conduit that reconnects them. Ambrétte begins preparing for a séance that she hopes will reveal her link to the spirit world (she communes with ghosts) and bring positive attention to her mother. Maman becomes sick, suffering “spells” that she believes are the result of “an animal spirit deep inside her,” leaving her increasingly bedridden. In the wake of this illness and several profound losses, Ambrétte must determine how her spiritual gifts will help her find a place in the world. While the author mostly sticks to a close third-person perspective following Ambrétte, the text also includes intriguing ephemera like excerpts from Maman’s spiritualist texts, a short story shared by a maid, and a note written by a friend. In keeping with the spiritualist theme, the story moves fluidly through time, jumping backward on several occasions to fill in the story of the Memenons (in particular, Papa's history as an electrical scientist). Bender gracefully conveys how the currents of the times and the influence of parents shape a young mind, and in Ambrétte the author has created a memorable character.
Patient, perceptive, and charged with a quiet emotional power.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781952600708
Page Count: 341
Publisher: Whiskey Tit
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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