An intriguing, richly detailed, fictionalized “eyewitness account” of the War of the Roses era.
Bisexual Eddie De-la-Pole details his involvement with the courts of Edward IV and Richard III and his embrace of Judaism in Brown’s historical novel.
The preface notes that the “following book” is a “curious apologia,” written in Middle English and found in a synagogue in Barcelona. The narrative takes the form of the memoir of Eddie De-la-Pole, who mentions that he and his “closest companion,” Rabbi Abraham di Mayora, are now “living, out our days and dreams” in Bruges and Toledo. Eddie shares highlights of his life story: In England in the year 1461, at age 16, he meets King Edward IV at the Battle of Towton. Eddie, a bisexual, is drawn to the charismatic king and soon, even more powerfully, to Edward’s new brother-in-law, Anthony Wydeville. When Eddie travels with Anthony to marry off Edward’s sister, Margaret (“the only woman I have ever actually wanted to marry,” Eddie confesses), to the Duke of Burgundy, the men are initiated into a secret society that leaves them “satiated and happily united as brothers, and loving friends.” Alas, the War of the Roses intrudes, with Anthony soon lost forever and Eddie, after backing King Richard III, fleeing to a new life with Abraham, the rabbi/court diplomat whom he initially disliked but comes to rely on. By novel’s end, Eddie, now past 70, is circumcised as part of his “adoption by the family of the children of Israel.” The author packs a lot of fun and flavor into this historical fiction, including Eddie’s take on Richard’s role in the “Princes in the Tower” mystery. Brown helpfully provides several family charts as references to the intertwining relationships. Some of the story’s threads remain tantalizingly elusive, such as the full import of Eddie’s ruby ring, and questions about just how sexual some friendships became. Overall, this book offers a wonderfully complex narrator’s perspective on a head-spinning time in history.
An intriguing, richly detailed, fictionalized “eyewitness account” of the War of the Roses era.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9781802277029
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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