An often delightful fantasy that will stick with readers long after they turn the last page.
A debut time-travel romance that romps through more than 200 years of history.
Audra Makenna Manning, born and bred in Tennessee, is a daydreamer. She has a great fondness for the music and movies of the 1940s as well as a passion for horses; she’s also socially awkward, much to the displeasure of her well-to-do paternal grandmother in New York City. In 2008, when Makenna is 19, her parents are killed in a motorcycle accident, and she decides to live with her nearby maternal grandfather, nicknamed “Pa,” whom she adores. On a horse farm, she gets a job tending horses and masters the art of trick riding. One evening, the son of the horse farm’s owner accosts her, so she escapes on her favorite steed, Quasar, and heads out into a storm. A spectacular flash of lightning stuns her senses, and she and her horse find themselves in a strange place: the year 1772. It seems that in the woods near Nashville, not far from Pa’s home, there’s a portal that allows travel through time. As Makenna tries to get her bearings, she meets Gabriel Christian, who warns her that a nearby band of Chickamauga warriors could be dangerous. Gabriel, an Englishman who moved to the American Colonies, is traveling with some partners, all intent upon staking land claims. Lost and befuddled, Makenna agrees to ride with them, hoping to find her way back home. The relationship that Taylor develops between Makenna and Gabriel is funny, sweet, and often cantankerous, although it takes a couple more time jumps before the possibility of romance develops. The time-travel plot construct also presents a fertile field for humorous miscommunication; when Makenna asks for a phone, for example, Gabriel says, “I am unfamiliar with that weaponry.” Taylor also makes great use of the cultural dissonance between a feisty 21st-century woman and a proper 18th-century gentleman. One leap brings the pair to 1863, and the author viscerally portrays the magnitude of suffering in the rural South during the Civil War. The surprise ending is pleasant, although it will require readers to willingly suspend their disbelief.
An often delightful fantasy that will stick with readers long after they turn the last page.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-5173-4
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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