An excellent work of historical fiction that delivers an engaging romance and memorable characters.
A debut novel set in early-19th-century Sweden offers palace intrigue and romance.
When readers dive into this work from lawyer-turned-author Scarborough, they will find the Swedish throne in a perilous position. Members of a French family, previously commoners, have completed an unlikely rise to power atop the Swedish royal ladder, led by Crown Prince Charles Jean and trailed by his son, Oscar, who is a mere 12 years old at the novel’s opening. Readers are immediately introduced to Jacquette Gyldenstolpe, a would-be maid of honor in the royal court and the daughter of Aurora De Geer Wetterstedt. Aurora is a baroness whose primary role in the court is holding salons for other royals both minor and major. Despite their difference in status—Jacquette is merely a court mistress while Oscar is a prince—a close friendship develops between them. When Oscar is sent to war in Norway, Jacquette is left behind in Sweden missing her friend. When he eventually returns, both are now in their late teens, and the tenor of their friendship begins to shift. Though he appears interested in a romance with Jacquette, he seems to be courting a young Swedish countess named Adelaide. As rumors swirl, he is also battling his father, who is enforcing a wide swath of censorship of local newspapers in the hopes of stifling opposition, an approach that Oscar vehemently disagrees with. When Jacquette realizes she can use her own connections to help her friend in his aims against his father, she and Oscar become closer than ever. A secret romance soon blossoms, the fallout of which will have massive consequences not only for Oscar and Jacquette, but potentially for the Swedish crown and the larger course of history as well.
By turns historical fiction and a classic romance, Scarborough’s novel manages to be fresh and exciting while remaining squarely part of a larger tradition of palace love stories. Part of this originality stems from the book’s location, as English-language readers are unlikely to have previously encountered many volumes about Swedish royalty. But its real heft is carried by Jacquette, a young woman whose divisions between loyalty, love, and family are crafted with nuance and compassion. Jacquette’s sensibilities are often well suited to modern readers, and her humorous distaste for the “Chatterati”—the young mistresses of the court—is one of the novel’s smaller pleasures: “She had a fervent desire for someone to find these girls husbands. Preferably short, old ones from Dalarna.” While readers looking for shocking twists and turns and a narrative that deviates from genre conventions may not find those elements here, Scarborough’s research and attention to the minute details of history offer an uncommonly smooth runway into the requisite context for readers to understand the gravity of the novel’s action. Although Jacquette is certainly the driver of the story’s action, the book’s pages are populated with unforgettable members of the court, be they Aurora, Oscar’s liaison Frederik Due, or even the blustery Carl Löwenhielm, who has his eye on Jacquette. Scarborough’s work may not be groundbreaking, but it makes for an engrossing and striking journey through a rarely covered period and place in history.
An excellent work of historical fiction that delivers an engaging romance and memorable characters.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9798896360506
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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