An uneven but ultimately enjoyable tale of Colonial New England.
Grindle presents a historical novel of witchcraft and war in Colonial America.
In the tightknit and often claustrophobic world of a coastal Maine village in 1688, teenage Resolve Hammond lives with her mother, an herbalist whose knowledge is often called on by her neighbors, though some of them are suspicious about the origins of her skills. In the book’s opening chapter, Resolve’s mother is unable to save Avis Hobbs, a woman who has been poisoned by her 10-year-old daughter, Abigail. Abigail develops a fixation on Resolve that threatens to become dangerous, but they face a more immediate threat when leaders of the colony’s militia instigate war against the local Indigenous tribes. Resolve and her mother, who spent time living with one of the tribes during King Philip’s War a decade earlier, attempt to mediate and avert bloodshed, which puts their standing in the town at further risk. The war brings Abigail’s older brother, Thaddeus, back to town, and, as he and Resolve grow close, she learns more about the harm Abigail has done. But a crucial moment brings her into alliance with Abigail and reveals mysteries about the abilities they share. The book’s first half meanders, particularly as it tiptoes around questions of Abigail’s culpability, the supernatural, and various village personalities, but the pacing solidifies by the narrative’s midpoint, when the looming war claims much of the focus—the second half is a page-turner. The often elaborate prose may not appeal to all readers (“A tiny coracle, I bob in her wake as she crosses the village, her long hair a single plait swinging down her back”), though all can appreciate the detailed and evocative imagery that brings the setting to life. Grindle’s approach to the complex historical background of the story rewards knowledgeable and curious readers without overwhelming the plot. The book explores questions of freedom and independence, offering a compelling perspective on the earliest days of New England’s history.
An uneven but ultimately enjoyable tale of Colonial New England.Pub Date: April 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781960610010
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Casa Croce Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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