A delightful small-town drama expertly bedecked with all of the trappings of a classic romance.
In O’Neill’s historical novel, a young woman confined by societal pressures finds her world turned upside down with the arrival of a handsome pilot with a complicated past.
In June of 1954, 19-year-old Sabina McTigue is staying with her Aunt Poppy at her house on Cape Cod for the summer. According to her family’s expectations, Sabina will attend Weston College in the fall and settle down into marriage with a suitable man. The problem is, she isn’t sure that’s what she wants for her life (“In her mind, Sabina could see it all unfolding: the next four years of her life, like a series of grim snapshots”). She becomes more uncertain after she meets Colin Hatch, a pilot who has been mysteriously discharged from the United States Army and has a reputation for romancing the local women. Sabina and Colin are drawn to each other, but the arrival of actress Isolde Martin complicates matters when she hires Colin to be her personal pilot. More dramas unfold as a socially significantwedding gets underway (with surprising results), Colin raises the ire of a wealthy real estate developer (whose scheme to turn Cape Cod into the next major tourist area depends on getting enough votes from the locals), and a hurricane barrels toward them all. O’Neill constructs an intricate web of societal and emotional entanglements that could easily snag in less capable hands; here, all of the pieces manage to fall into place with relative ease. (The somewhat drawn-out summary of Colin’s checkered past near the novel’s conclusion is a rare instance of narrative clumsiness). With snappy dialogue (“Congratulations. I do crossword puzzles in my bed jacket. Let’s not burn daylight, dear”) and well-developed characters (even the minor players feel rich and fully drawn), O’Neill has written a compelling story of love, dashed expectations, and second chances.
A delightful small-town drama expertly bedecked with all of the trappings of a classic romance.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798896360247
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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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