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
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
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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