A richly entertaining tale that delivers a captivating history lesson.
A historical novel focuses on King Kamehameha’s successful consolidation of the Hawaiian Islands.
John Young, bosun on the Eleanora, and Isaac Davis, a gunner’s mate, have been captured by the forces of Kamehameha, the most powerful chief on the Big Island (Hawaii, aka Moku Nui). Those forces have also seized a small sloop called the Fair American. Kamehameha recognizes and values talent: Young is to captain the Fair American and Davis is to train the chief’s warriors in the use of Western armaments. These men resist as long as they can—even plot to escape—but eventually, with no other options, they join Kamehameha’s cause, and he even elevates them to ali’i (noble) status. Kamehameha is determined to extend his rule to all of Moku Nui, then conquer the string of islands to the northwest that will become part of present-day Hawaii. This entails ferocious fighting, and Young and Davis do their part. At the book’s end, Kamehameha has conquered all but far-flung Kaua’i and Ni’ihau. O’Leary sticks very close to the actual history, including the important native characters and Kamehameha’s haole (foreign) advisers, Young and Davis. The author is an accomplished writer with a wonderful, (mostly) true tale to tell. Well drawn is the friendship between Young and Davis, strangers in a strange land who first want only to flee but finally, when Capt. Vancouver offers them passage home to England, realize that, with families now, they have become Hawaiians. Still, they never quite get over the brutality that is in ironic contrast to this Edenic archipelago. In Kamehameha’s world, one’s life is loosely held and to die in combat is reward enough. The battles are incredibly grotesque, gory affairs where “expertly wielded war clubs crush skulls, daggers disembowel, spears impale.” So readers get high drama, epic battles, and an engaging account of Hawaiian history. O’Leary provides a useful glossary of the Hawaiian words sprinkled liberally through the text, though they will still present a challenge to the audience. And because the Hawaiian characters’ names will be quite confusing to many readers, a list of them as front matter would have been helpful.
A richly entertaining tale that delivers a captivating history lesson.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-980924-49-4
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2020
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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