A sweet tale of love in wartime.
In this novel, a directionless woman finds a relative and an identity in her grandmother’s World War II story.
Georgina Smytheson is living a glamorous life in Manhattan in 2016 when her mother asks her to visit her grandmother Eve in England. Georgina decides to leave immediately. Shortly after she arrives, her grandmother remarks that Georgina has her grandfather’s eyes, which inspires Eve to tell a story. In 1943, Eve’s family owned a glove shop in Worcester. Eve intended to train as a nurse, but because she was fluent in French, she was recruited by the Royal Air Force for a special mission as an undercover agent in France. She used her skills as a glovemaker to send packages with messages to London during the war. In 2016, Georgina unearths such a package, which contains a single pink glove that triggers important memories about Eve’s wartime experiences. As Eve’s recollections unfold, she tells Georgina about Luc Gaspard, a young man she met while working undercover in France (“His deep blue eyes reminded her of the sea on a summer’s day”). Eve and Luc had an affair, and he is Georgina’s grandfather. Although Eve believes he died in the war, she isn’t certain, and Georgina attempts to track him down. She ultimately discovers more than she ever thought possible. Williams’ engaging story bounces back and forth between past and present, showing Eve’s life during the war and in 2016, when she tells Georgina secrets she’s never revealed to anyone. For Georgina, the disclosures lead to new clues about her own past and identity. Eve’s tale explains why Georgina’s mother, Angela, is so difficult. The war story turns out to be a lot more intriguing than the contemporary tale; Georgina has led a charmed life, and readers will find it a bit difficult to sympathize with her. In contrast, Eve’s story is sad, full of danger, and speaks to the horrors of war even for those not fighting on the front. The novel’s ending is a little convenient but very poignant. Still, the book almost feels truncated; readers may find themselves wanting more drama at the end.
A sweet tale of love in wartime.Pub Date: April 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63988-352-3
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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