A well-researched, briskly paced historical novel that makes the most of the author’s unique family history.
A Revolutionary War novel based on a curious genealogical discovery.
Based on the author’s distant ancestor, the novel’s young Thomas Elwell is itching for adventure and fortune and sees his chance in volunteering for Lord Dunmore’s War, an incursion into Native American lands in the Ohio Valley. He’s disenchanted by this experience but nevertheless is encouraged by the Sons of Liberty to fight in the coming revolution. He’s also learned some rudimentary fighting tactics and discipline that will be well honed by the time he signs up with the Continental Army along with his large and hearty childhood friend, Levi Hall. Together they engage the king’s forces from Charleston to Monmouth, Brandywine, Germantown, and—ironically—Charleston again, where Thomas is injured so badly that he’s retired from the front lines. But the crux—as in crucible—of the book is the bitter winter at Valley Forge, where Thomas meets young Elizabeth (Betty) Bryan, a volunteer nurse who will eventually become his wife and the mother of their eight children. As Smith explains in a prologue, the genesis of the book was his father’s interest in family genealogy. After his father’s death, Smith took up the search and eventually discovered their distant ancestor, Thomas Elwell, who fought with distinction in the Revolutionary War. This discovery inspired a clever and poignant framing device for the book where Smith, equipped with camp chair and water bottle, visits his father’s grave in Indiana and spends a long summer day reading the manuscript he’s just finished to his old man, with breaks throughout to remind readers of this setting. The novel is well researched, and sometimes Smith steps out of the story to add details and specifics that Thomas wouldn’t know: For instance, that winter at Valley Forge had a higher death toll (21%, proportionately) than any one battle in the war. This well-executed debut novel would be a fine complement to Ken Burns’ recent (and excellent) documentary about the Revolutionary War.
A well-researched, briskly paced historical novel that makes the most of the author’s unique family history.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9798994590508
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Voyager Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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