This worthwhile read brings a little-known tragedy to vivid life.
A debut historical novel set in 19th-century Spain offers a trove of philosophical, social, and political clashes.
On April, 18, 1886, Cayetano Galeote Cotilla, a defrocked priest, shot and killed the bishop of Madrid in front of hundreds of witnesses. The murderer and the crime are real, and Battersby’s tale revolves around the punishment for the deed. Will Cayetano live or die? Enter two protagonists, also historical figures. One is the novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, “the most famous Spanish writer whom many English-speaking readers may not know by name or reputation.” The other is the eminent alienist (as psychiatrists were then called) Luis Simarro. Benito and Luis are former friends. Luis is a scientist with a special interest in the care of the mentally ill, called at the time degenerates. He is also a determinist. Benito is a fierce humanist, a believer in free will. Luis is convinced that Cayetano is mad, a degenerate born of a family with a sketchy genetic history. Benito wants to show that Cayetano is rational even though a finding of insanity might save his life. Cayetano is sentenced to death, but the judgment is later overturned. The real point of the engrossing story is the intrigue that is hinted at throughout. The political situation in Spain pervades everything and affects the outcome of the trial. The cast includes leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, the Royalists, the revolutionary Progressives, and others. Alliances are formed for convenience and broken for the same reason. Fortunes are ever shifting, mistrust abounds, and the country is weary. In the end, it is Benito who becomes Battersby’s intuitive hero, holding humane values and puzzling things out. Luis is deftly portrayed as a good man, but his research brings him to the brink of eugenics, the scariest of 19th-century pseudo-sciences. The author’s enthusiasm—and proselytizing—for Galdós’ books is touching and admirable (Maximiliano Rubín is one of the Spanish novelist’s characters). And Battersby’s rich details will transport readers to the turbulent era of his complex protagonists.
This worthwhile read brings a little-known tragedy to vivid life.Pub Date: March 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-913332-00-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: Tre Cappelli Editions
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
