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
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
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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