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
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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