Deft portrayals of people and their surroundings distinguish this historical journey.
In Curtis’ historical novel, a teen girl travels in a caravan from Missouri to the Willamette Valley.
Seventeen-year-old Winnie Hayes wants to feel as excited as her Papa does about the free land in the Oregon Territory available to new arrivals settling there for a five-year period, but the family’s 2,000 mile journey there from Missouri as part of a covered wagon caravan is grueling. Winnie’s delicate newlywed sister, Nora, is even less enthused about the trip; however, her little brother, Elijah, perks up as he hopes to encounter some Indigenous people. Though Winnie misses the animals on the family farm, she soon finds other interests; one is the cowhand Hal Clark, who is sweet on her, and a friendship also grows with Mae Cook, daughter of the caravan’s trail guide, Big John. Winnie admires unmarried Mae’s freedom—she’s “a doer,” confident on a horse and able to handle firearms. Winnie wants to be similarly brave, but unlike Mae, she fears the Indigenous population. This distrust is one of the many attitudes Winnie must adjust during her eventful voyage. Bear and bandit attacks, injuries, sickness, deaths, and births bring about realizations regarding important subjects like marriage and bearing children, valuing different cultures, the existence of God, and what constitutes a family. While the author takes on large-scale issues, Curtis’ unadorned writing never feels heavy-handed. After a man’s accidental shooting death, Winnie reflects simply that “His body would lie here, all alone. Beneath a giant prairie sky.” There is an authenticity to the likable characters, even the most minor ones, including a fiddle player in the caravan and a grieving mother. The author has a gift of summing up people concisely; “tall and gangly” Jeb, Nora’s husband, is always “leaning this way or that, like a stalk of wheat.” Nora and Winnie are contrasted as being like “a gentle breeze” and “a runaway horse.” Whether the scenery is enormous rock monoliths, the carbonated waters of Soda Springs, or prairie grasses “tossing about like a rooted sea,” the compelling descriptions of the landscape along the Willamette Valley command attention.
Deft portrayals of people and their surroundings distinguish this historical journey.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781509263165
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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