A compelling historical novel with a theological focus set in a rarely visited time period.
A group of Druids in 788 CE England search for a new safe haven in Linden’s historical novel.
This fourth book in the author’s series weaves together several threads established in the first three installments. The remaining Druids (a priestly class of Celts who held a deep reverence for nature) in Britain at this time faced persecution by the dominant Saxon Christian culture. A relatively large group of Druids once lived in secret at their shrine before their location was betrayed and they were forced to flee, some of them losing their lives in the process. After a long separation, the remaining Druids’ paths finally converge. Feywn, the high priestess, and Cyri, her niece and heir, are pretending to be Christians at an inn in Codswallow while they wait for others to join them. Caelym, a young Druid priest, struck out on his own on a rescue mission, but he finally reunites with the others at the inn. The group sets off for a new, semi-mythical shrine where they hope to rebuild their community. Meanwhile, Stefan, the sheriff of Codswallow, is returning to the shire with a plan to eradicate the bandits that have been plaguing the area. The sheriff discovers and captures Caelym (whom he considers to be a dangerous heathen) and survives a subsequent attempt on his life. The remainder of the book primarily deals with the Druids being forced to help Stefan foil both the bandits and his would-be assassins in order to save their own lives. The prose is lively and accessible; while characters use an archaic style of speech (“You’ve heard then! Word of my ruination has preceded me!”), the conversations still flow well. In the latter half of the narrative, a play-within-a-play plot device considerably slows down the pace and could have been significantly condensed. Interludes between the story’s sections provide both levity and engaging historical context. The characters are well-developed, and their disparate motivations provide a strong basis for the story’s development. Despite the relatively action-filled plot, the focus remains on the characters’ relationships and the spiritual clash between Druids and Saxon Christians.
A compelling historical novel with a theological focus set in a rarely visited time period.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781647429706
Page Count: 368
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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