An often compelling wartime drama despite uneven prose.
In this historical novel set during World War II, a British pilot’s dangerous service takes a toll on his marriage.
In 1942, Malta has been reduced to a “land of privation of suffering” but remains a strategically crucial territory despite its small size. Eleanor Shaux, stationed in Malta with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, captures the significance of the island succinctly in dialogue: “If we lose Malta, we lose the Med. If we lose the Med, we lose the Suez Canal and our access to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. If we lose that, we lose the war.” To make matters worse, a massive confrontation looms with Gen. Erwin Rommel, the most skilled tactician in the German military, who has Malta in his sights. Eleanor’s husband, Johnnie Shaux, is in the Royal Air Force, and he’s known as a “fighter pilot’s fighter pilot” who braves danger repeatedly and believes his death will come in the “blinding glare of the killing fields.” The situation challenges the couple’s marriage, and Eleanor wonders if she’s complicit in Johnnie’s near-certain fate—that she’s “sacrificed her husband to the gods of war.” Rhodes’ knowledge of the historical circumstances of this tale, which crescendo with the siege of Malta, is magisterial—rigorous and granular but also with an impressive sense of context. He also sensitively captures the psyche of the fighter pilot, who must strenuously maintain vigilance and composure. The prose strains unsuccessfully for poetic profundity at times, as in this description of the military office’s disheveled design: “It was easy to get lost, and Eleanor sometimes wondered if the mythical Minotaur—half man, half bull—would suddenly spring, snarling, from around some stygian corner.” However, these moments don’t undermine the novel’s overall power, which largely lies in its historical astuteness.
An often compelling wartime drama despite uneven prose.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73537-362-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: John Rhodes
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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