An ingeniously plotted fiction debut with well-drawn characters and plenty of historical depth.
In Mulvahill’s debut novel, a socialite/philanthropist hires an art historian/detective to retrieve paintings that Nazis pilfered from her family’s Paris art gallery during WWII.
Nicole (née Cassin), the protagonist of this labyrinthine tale, was an outspoken Parisian girl who hated the occupying Nazis with a passion. The Cassins were Jewish, so it was only a matter of time before the Nazis took away her father and her mother. Despite the Gestapo’s constant presence, Nicole continues to work at the family gallery, now “Aryanized” and run by a small-time opportunist. The German occupiers are initially polite, but soon the brutality surfaces, which prompts Nicole to join the French Resistance. Eventually, the novel turns into a tense nail-biting thriller: Can she keep her membership in the resistance a secret until the arrival of the Allied liberators? Meanwhile, in a postwar flash forward, decades later, art historian/sleuth Robert Ames, hired by Nicole, has managed to locate her former GI lover, Sam Popinski, in a Detroit retirement home. The interview does not go well, and Popinski dies that very night. But the real bomb drops when his son, seeing a snapshot of Popinski before his enlistment, says, “That’s not my father!” But there is an upside: At the retirement home Robert meets young staff psychologist Amy Wexford, and they soon become not just a team of sleuths but lovers. Do they recover the stolen paintings? Well, thanks to modern computer data bases, Robert’s expertise, and Amy’s pluck, the search is not as hopeless as it might seem.
Mulvahill has a visual art background, which she uses to good effect throughout. She is also an imaginative writer capable of turning an original phrase now and again (a village’s destruction had been “meaningless as a domino to be toppled on the way to a pyrrhic victory”). In some ways, the Popinski subplot is even more intriguing than the search for the paintings. When it first begins to seem that there must be a lifelong Popinski imposter somewhere in the bosom of his family, the reader might wonder: How in the world is Mulvahill going to pull this off? We do find out that Robert came by his calling honestly, because his beloved grandfather had not only been a museum curator but also one of the Monuments Men at the tail end of the war, resulting in some moving vignettes and reflections on the futility of war. Robert is also a credible (if secretive) artist, and Amy encourages him to come out of the closet, as it were. The philosophy of art looms large all throughout the novel: Should it be valued as product or process? What about the venality of art dealers and collectors? At one point Robert and Amy have a playful discussion about the value of a work of art versus a human life (to his credit, Robert says that no work of art is worth a human life). But later on, we find out that Robert and Amy’s silly parlor game prefigured a real and tragic choice that Nicole inadvertently had to make.
An ingeniously plotted fiction debut with well-drawn characters and plenty of historical depth.Pub Date: March 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781915023582
Page Count: 296
Publisher: EnvelopeBooks
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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