Historical vampire antics for those who don’t demand fresh prose.
In Siddiqui’s first novel for adults, an Indian woman finds herself in England working for the future author of Frankenstein.
It’s 1815, and Mehrunissa Begum, the 24-year-old daughter of an Indian noblewoman and a British officer, is traveling by steamship from India to London; to honor her dead mother’s wishes, Mehr must deliver an inheritance letter to her brother, who fails to meet her ship. Mehr is accustomed to being served, not serving others, yet with her abandonment by her brother, she has no choice but to seek employment to earn money for her passage back to India. Mehr grudgingly accepts a job as a housemaid for a baronet and poet named Percy Shelley and his wife, Mary, who informs Mehr at their first meeting, “I am working on a novel.” Some months later, Mehr is brought along when the family summers at a villa in Geneva, where supernatural events follow the arrival of Lord Byron. Or is the havoc-wreaker the ghost of the former lady of the villa, “yearning to free herself from this terrible place,” as is Mehr? By making Mehr, from whose perspective the story is told, a haughty brat, Siddiqui takes an admirable risk that doesn’t necessarily pay off: The novel is initially slow-footed, with nothing at stake beyond its sulky protagonist’s ability to earn enough cash to sail home. As the book approaches its midpoint, however, things get creepy, and soon enough vampire-y—manna for retro-horror fans who can overlook some formulaic writing (there’s an awful lot of trembling and shuddering). While Siddiqui presumes the reader’s familiarity with literary figures of the Shelleys’ time, her book is ultimately concerned not with the personal demons that begat Frankenstein but with the demons that overrun one Genevan villa.
Historical vampire antics for those who don’t demand fresh prose.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781641297011
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hell's Hundred
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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
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