Not the best installment of the impressive trilogy, but an intriguing conclusion nonetheless.
The hardscrabble Allan family has faced nearly every threat their rough, self-sufficient pioneer life in Big Sur country has to offer, but it’s mankind that finally presents a challenge the family may not be able to overcome.
As in all the novels of Ross’ trilogy, Big Sur country is an entity unto itself. The land shaped all three generations of the Allans; it’s what defines them. But now the government is blasting a road through the pristine wild country Zande Allan loves, and the stubborn family patriarch is determined to stop it. His grandson and namesake, Zan, sees the road differently—it’s progress and opportunity, and he wants to be a part of its creation. When Zan defies his headstrong grandfather, Zande cuts him out of the family, and Zan begins working on the road crew, blasting away the land he’s always loved to allow more people to discover it. But after his irresponsible cousin, Tilli, kills the man who spurned her, Zan realizes he has to save the family’s reputation by taking the blame for the murder, which lands him in prison. Seven years later, he returns to a world that has moved on without him and makes no place for an ex-con—and the woman he loves is out of his reach because of it. Like all the Allans in Ross’ trilogy, Zan is a compelling character: strong-minded, honorable, hardworking. And like all the Allans, it’s his own unbending adherence to his core values that contributes to his undoing. In Zan’s case, it’s family pride that convinces him to save the honor of a cousin who doesn’t deserve his sacrifice; and later, stubborn pride—and fear—keep him from admitting his love for Lara Ramirez, the girl raised by his beloved grandmother. Co-written by Koeppel 50 years after Ross’ death, this installment doesn’t feel quite as smooth or authentic as the other two titles in the series. But like the others, it’s a fascinating character study, a realistic portrait of one of America’s final frontiers and a book that’s hard to put down.
Not the best installment of the impressive trilogy, but an intriguing conclusion nonetheless.Pub Date: April 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-467950-08-4
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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