An engaging, albeit occasionally overwrought, melodrama with copious historical details.
Bald wraps up her House of Baric trilogy, a family drama of war, intrigue, and romance, set in the mid-17th-century Venetian Republic.
It’s the summer of 1649, and the Baric household is on the move. Picking up where the second book in Bald’s trilogy ended, Part 3 begins with Jero Baric and Ruby Spiros on the road. Accompanied by four mercenaries, the couple is now deep within the Ottoman Empire, heading to the Greek port of Thessaloniki, where they hope to receive permission to marry from Ruby’s father. Suddenly, a member of a roving trio of Balkan thieves tries to kidnap Ruby. The frightening event is the catalyst for a cascade of life-and-death adventures and misadventures that comprise the first quarter of the novel. Back at Baric Castle, Baron Mauro Baric is unaware of his brother’s dire circumstances. Mauro, his Ottoman Greek wife, Resi, and their entourage are preparing to leave the Venetian territory of Croatia for a wedding celebration in Venice, where they will stay at the luxurious family estate of Mauro’s ebullient friend Fabian Carrera. Excitement is in the air, and the novel moves from its grim opening to the gaiety of high society Venice. The Baric and Carrera women take center stage in this lavish period piece composed in modern-day prose. The visit to Venice is an enjoyable, historically rich, and brightly colored narrative excursion into the beauty of the city and the extravagant lifestyles of the royal Venetians. It is a welcome respite from Jero’s travails. But when Resi joins the Carrera women to attend a wedding party tea honoring Mira, the soon-to-be-bride, she sees the waspishness just below the refined surface of the bejeweled and elegantly gowned ladies. The large cast and complex relationships will likely require initial patience from those new to the series and unfamiliar with the intricate character backstories. Although Bald has posted summaries of the first two volumes on her blog (JillianBald.com), this novel may appeal more to readers looking for an immersive portrait of an era instead of nonstop action.
An engaging, albeit occasionally overwrought, melodrama with copious historical details.Pub Date: June 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-943594-13-9
Page Count: 546
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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