A violent and funny, if uneven, adventure that leaves no one safe.
A supernatural novel—set in Massachusetts—focuses on a cruel band of mythical warriors.
Pukwudgees, “small Indians of ancient legend,” may be about the height of a child, yet they are far from harmless. After some Pukwudgees venture through a magical hole in the ground, they wind up in the year 1992. The place is New Seabury, a coastal community on Cape Cod. It is a town for summer getaways for some and full time living for others. But with Pukwudgees on the loose with weapons, it is a horrible place to be. Anyone in their path is wounded. Negotiation is not an option. Never mind what these monsters will do once a person has been felled. Back in 1968, a group of boys from different backgrounds discovered the hole as a “doorway through time.” Their curiosity allowed them to visit with a supposed witch from the 1700s named Sarah Screecham. This event also unleashed the Pukwudgees on the unsuspecting people of the future. Can the boys go back in time and prevent this catastrophe from occurring? They’ll have a lot of work to do before August 1992. Cunis’ bloody, bizarre story is at its best (and most brutal) when it concentrates on the Pukwudgees. These evil creatures follow a kill-now, ask-questions-later policy. Yet they still have a humorous bent. As warriors, they are forever on the warpath. They see the vehicles of 1992 as beasts with “crystal eyes.” The fact that these beings are not very big in stature adds to the dark comedy. Somewhat less enthralling are the time-traveling boys. Readers will learn much about their backstories, though the details are not particularly imaginative. For instance, Timmy O’Rielly is from Boston and his brother has connections to the mob. The gangsters say bland things like “Pay back’s a bitch.” This type of information pales in comparison to the thrills and chills of mythical marauders terrorizing everyone in their path.
A violent and funny, if uneven, adventure that leaves no one safe.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 979-8408046478
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2022
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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