A heartfelt, harrowing, and engrossing tale set during the Reconstruction era.
A historical novel focuses on a doctor’s apprentice in Illinois after the Civil War.
As in many of the penny dreadfuls Tom Slocum loves, his adventure starts with the arrival of a mysterious stranger in town. This man turns the teenager’s community of Sandy Ford upside down. Amid the turmoil, 15-year-old Tom discovers that the enemies of freedom may be in his own backyard—and that it often takes sharper skills to save a life than to end one. From the moment Dr. Robert Steele arrives on the Daisy Belleferry in 1871, Tom’s life is forever changed. Though admired for his healing skills, Steele fans the flames of controversy with his advocacy for peace and modern sensibilities in the Ku Klux Klan–controlled town. Recognizing Tom’s potential as a doctor, Steele makes him his apprentice, sharing his medical wisdom and introducing him to a broader world. But with this new knowledge comes danger, and Tom finds himself targeted by the Klan. When Tom’s father dies, a corrupt bureaucrat confines the teen to an orphanage that’s fueled by forced labor. Compelled to escape, Tom finds shelter with a Black family, reuniting with Steele and further stoking conflict with the local Klansmen. When the Klan’s leader is shot, Tom learns to set aside the ideals of a gunslinger and assume the mantle of a healer. Rife with examples of racism and religious hypocrisy, Raffensperger’s depiction of life in the post–Civil War Midwest may upend cherished notions of the freedom proffered by the American government of the time. Contextualizing these struggles against the backdrop of the brutality of war and its aftermath, the story calls into question the justification of systematized violence—extolling instead the power of education and true charity. But the author offers more than a thoughtful political story. Filled with excitement, intriguing medical interventions, and the triumph of forbidden love, the gripping historical adventure will delight readers.
A heartfelt, harrowing, and engrossing tale set during the Reconstruction era.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68235-519-0
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
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