An intricately detailed novel of resistance and community.
A Jewish woman fights forced conversion in 18th-century Rome in Davidow’s historical novel.
The author takes inspiration from a diary written by Anna del Monte shortly after her 1749 kidnapping and imagines the interior lives of everyone involved in the community-shaping event. The 18-year-old Anna, a member of one of the prominent families in Rome’s Jewish ghetto, is taken into custody by the Catholic church under a law that allows the church to attempt to convert her by force. As she remains imprisoned for nearly two weeks, subjected to sermons, assaults, and other forms of persuasion, Anna remains secure in both her Judaism and her confidence in her own arguments, but suffers from her treatment and from the agony of never knowing what will happen next or when she might be freed. The story moves between Anna’s cell and the outside world as her relatives mobilize to fight for her freedom, clerics experience mixed feelings about the righteousness of their work, and other Roman Jews try to survive in a system designed to harass them out of their religious beliefs. The author creates rich backstories for the individuals Anna encounters, including a nun who converted from Judaism, a noblewoman who relies on contraceptives obtained from the ghetto, the archbishop in charge of her captivity, and a peasant woman selling buttons on the street. Anna is an engaging protagonist, authentic to her time and circumstances but also comprehensible to the modern reader. While the narrative can feel repetitive at times, with the incessant conversion attempts and repeated references to the del Monte family’s social status, it also brings together the plot’s many threads into a satisfying resolution. The authorial voice tends toward the portentous and melodramatic, but in a way that recalls 18th-century literary style (“For nearly two centuries, the Jews of Rome have been crowded into a pestilential enclosure in the lowest part of the city, their rights gradually but continually diminished, and yet the Church has not converted a tenth of them”), and Davidow’s incorporation of significant historical detail further brings Anna’s world to life.
An intricately detailed novel of resistance and community.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781958972083
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2023
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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