A gutsy, fearless protagonist leads a novel that challenges the absurdity of segregationist laws.
A rebellious New Orleans lawyer in the 1950s works on behalf of a Black couple who want to adopt a biracial child in Martinez’s novel.
Against the sultry, jazzy backdrop of New Orleans, attorney Noel Corbin, also known as Crow, has struggled with sobriety and dedicated his career to helping those who get a raw deal in the city’s corrupt legal system. Crow has been a lawyer for the Cajun mafia, and local opinions of him are mixed. (A Tulane professor tells him, “I’ve heard you’re a free spirit representing various entertainers, gamblers, nonconformists, and the occasional civil rights case using dubious methods.”) A colleague approaches Crow with a perplexing case: An evidently biracial child named Dove is caught in an absurd legal limbo due to the south’s racist laws. Her mother was white, but died soon after childbirth, and Dove’s birth certificate lists the baby as white. A Black couple wishes to adopt Dove but cannot, as the law disallows interracial adoption. The state refuses to change the birth certificate until the presumably Black father comes forward. Crow is troubled by the story and, upon meeting the prospective parents, assures them he has the contacts within (and outside of) government to give them a fighting chance. So far, the state has refused to budge, but Crow pulls from every resource he can think of to find a way for this family to have the happiness they deserve. Martinez’s legal drama, based on a real case in Louisiana, has an imperfect but likable protagonist in Crow, whose Cajun roots and legal career make the story a lively love letter to the local culture and a damning indictment of the era’s racial policies. The author’s wry sensibility regarding the legal system’s corruption is amusing and illuminating, while the absurdity of Dove’s specific case is described in a matter-of-fact, common-sense way. The novel drags somewhat in the middle as the characters await the trial, but the unexpected conclusion feels authentic.
A gutsy, fearless protagonist leads a novel that challenges the absurdity of segregationist laws.Pub Date: May 15, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 316
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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