Thrills aplenty as readers await the next installment of this well-researched series.
In this follow-up to The Burning Chambers, (2019) Mosse’s characters endure the horrors of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, in which the Huguenots—members of the French Protestant minority—were attacked by Catholics.
Minou Reydon, the Huguenot protagonist of Chambers, and her husband, Piet, are now, in 1572, the nobility in residence at Château de Puivert in Languedoc after having wrested it from a usurper. Minou’s entire extended family lives in the castle, including her brother, Aimeric, sister, Alis, and her Aunt Salvadora. Minou and Piet have two children, precocious 7-year-old Marta and toddler Jean-Jacques. The family’s idyll is about to be interrupted, though. Piet’s former friend Vidal, now a Catholic cardinal, is scheming to carry out grudges against both Minou and Piet, one long-standing and one very recent: Vidal has suspicions about Piet’s lineage that he is determined to both confirm and conceal. The Reydons’ troubles begin when they leave Puivert to attend a royal wedding in Paris. Marguerite, the Catholic daughter of Catherine de’ Medici, is to marry Henri, the Huguenot king of Navarre, who will one day accede to the throne of France. Many hope that the match will signal a truce in the religious strife that has rocked France for decades. However, certain renegade Catholics, led by the Duke of Guise and abetted by Vidal, plan a limited strike on key Huguenots in town for the wedding. But the violence spreads until a mob has murdered thousands. Minou, Piet, their son, and Salvadora manage to escape but, through a profoundly unlucky turn of events, leave Marta behind. This act will test Minou and Piet’s marital bond as, in exile from France, they establish a new life in Amsterdam. Mosse keeps a firm grip on the extremely complex Reformation history in which her characters are enmeshed. The role of Vidal in the plot is less successfully executed. The aging and ailing prelate appears too overtly crazy to fulfill his intended role as mastermind and nemesis. And there may be too many minutely described stabbings for some tastes.
Thrills aplenty as readers await the next installment of this well-researched series.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-20218-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.
The true story of Axis diplomats detained in the U.S. at the start of World War II is transformed into a dazzling historical novel set at a sumptuous West Virginia hotel.
Bestselling YA fantasy author Stiefvater’s adult debut introduces a writer whose prodigious imagination and distinctive prose style have combined to create a novel that will remind readers of why they fell in love with reading in the first place. At its center is the captivating June Hudson, an erstwhile Appalachian orphan who was taken in by the wealthy Gilfoyle family, owners of the Avallon Hotel & Spa, a high-society retreat built over underground mineral springs. At his death, the patriarch bequeathed ownership to his playboy son, Edgar, but made June the general manager, as she had spent her life learning the business—and also shared with Gilfoyle Sr. a rare gift relating to the “sweetwater” springs, a fantastical element of this otherwise realistic novel. Aside from the magical waters and a few other fanciful details, Stiefvater’s fictional world is based on extensive research into high-end hotels of the period, creating a version of luxury so appealing that readers will wish they could check into the Avallon and stay on indefinitely. In fact, the novel revolves around the true meaning of luxury. To June, it has nothing to do with wealth; it is more connected to joy, and to the book’s title: “June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury.” Also brilliantly managed is the rest of the ensemble cast: sexy FBI agents; June’s inimitable staff; the delegations of Japanese, Germans, and Italians detained at the hotel, some quite nasty, but among them a strange, special, totally silent child. And on top of all this, a delicious love story!
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593655504
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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