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
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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