A well-crafted historical epic with a vibrant cast.
In this historical novel, a Chinese princess finds adventure, danger, and a surprising romance while on a trade mission to Rome.
At the age of 24, Princess Huang Hua has spent 10 years in the Han Dynasty’s imperial court, most of them married to Prince Liu Qian, a kind man who supports her desire to further her education. While Hua and Qian enjoy a strong bond, she is distressed at her inability to have a child, although she is close with Xiaosheng, the prince’s son with a concubine. When the imperial majesty asks Qian and Hua to travel to Rome and help establish a trade agreement, she sees it as an opportunity to explore exciting new lands. Alexander Severus is a Roman guard in the palace of Augustus with a talent for painting. Heartbroken after his girlfriend, Diana Lampadius, betrays him, he soon finds himself on the hunt for a killer when she is murdered. Assigned to guard Hua while she’s in Rome, Alexander is captivated by the Chinese princess. Despite threats from the Parthians, the trade mission is a success. But when Alexander and Hua fall in love, she is left with a difficult decision—return to China and her life with Qian or remain in Rome with Alexander. Kunkel’s novel is a historical romance replete with dynamic characters and a strong story structure. Hua and Alexander are amiable protagonists whose backstories unfold in a series of alternating chapters at the beginning of the book. The author’s methodical approach effectively establishes fully realized relationships, especially the one between Hua and her childhood friend and handmaiden, Jin Chyou. That said, the dialogue is starkly modern in contrast with the setting and time period. At one point, Alexander asserts: “Joking. Being funny. I know them. They make fun of the pompous rich. Darling this. Darling that. Sweetie. Dear. All a put-on.” Still, the tale offers an engaging mix of action and romance.
A well-crafted historical epic with a vibrant cast.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798986769479
Page Count: 411
Publisher: Valeria Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
