An atmospheric magical-realist tale with a compellingly ominous interpretation of the gold rush.
A young woman embarks on a quest to hold off Yankee gold miners in this alternate-history YA novel.
When three strangers ride into the rancho of Don Ygnacio Delgado in Alta California, they bring alarming news. It’s June 1846, and Yankees—called Bear Flaggers for their makeshift, grizzly-bear standard—have captured Gen. Mariano Vallejo and claimed the whole territory for the United States. The raiders also killed the brother of Tomás Tomás, the older rider, as well as three Delgado family friends. Tomás, who is Costanoan, has another shock for 16-year-old Catalina Delgado; she is his granddaughter. Her real mother, now dead, was named Rain Falling, and Catalina is a mestiza, not pure gente de razón. This newfound status could lower her prospects of marriage to her beloved Ángelo Ortega, a match already in danger from a prophecy that a Spirit Man will come and take her away. In a world where Catalina is locked into her bedroom every night to protect her reputation, Ángelo’s father will insist on a girl of unblemished chastity. Now, Tomás relates Rain Falling’s childhood dream, in which a prophetic spiritual figure called Coyote said that her daughter would be stolen, to be returned when she hides a gold strike. This will be heralded by three signs—a false bear flag, a murdered brother, and a man on a black Andalusian stallion riding a thunder cloud. On his black horse, Spirit Man does come to Catalina. He shows her gold nuggets in a stream and a hiding place, Spirit Waker Cave, although the inevitable “plague of two-legged flies” that will transform Alta California can only be postponed. Catalina, too, as well as her hopes and dreams, will be forever changed by her challenging new destiny.
In her second YA novel that’s set in a magical-realist 19th-century California, Hill gives readers a wonderfully imaginative, unsettling view of events leading up to the 1849 gold rush. Many narratives emphasize the excitement of this time and California’s newfound wealth, population growth, and influence, but this book foreshadows the disasters—starvation, slaughter, dispossession—inflicted on Indigenous people. It’s a theme that could become heavy-handed, but Catalina’s passionate teenage energy gives propulsion to the dramatic plot. She’s caught up in a whirlwind of romantic hopes; her fear of the mysterious, ambiguous Spirit Man and his nameless horse; the weightiness of her task; and spiritual questioning. Although multiple prophecies and spiritual forces push Catalina on her transformative journey, the urgency doesn’t seem warranted given that her efforts will have very limited effect and duration. It’s hinted that her alteration will help connect loved ones, but that seems unrelated to the gold question. Still, typical teenager-with-a-quest stories end in shiny triumph (even if losses occur along the way), and Hill does well to take the story beyond that trope in unexpected directions that show the depth of Catalina’s sacrifice and love.
An atmospheric magical-realist tale with a compellingly ominous interpretation of the gold rush.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-949534-20-7
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Sand Hill Review Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2021
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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