Richly develops an important player and propels a winning series.
A weary lifelong soldier comes into his own in this historical novel.
Stefan is a disgruntled Saxon soldier who’s never gotten his due. Still, he’s determined to make the most of his new appointment as the sheriff for the Shire of Codswallow. Once there, Stefan meets an important citizen—Jonathan, the keeper of the Sleeping Dragon Inn. From Jonathan, Stefan learns there are bandits robbing residents and visitors on the roads into Codswallow. Jonathan has a secret: He’s a former Druid priest named Labhruinn who was falsely accused of betraying his shrine and then banished, described in The Valley (2022), the series’ second book. Then Druid priestess Feywn and her niece Cyri arrive at the Dragon. They’ve gotten separated from the rest of their Druid cult who are seeking a new home after their previously hidden location had been revealed. But before Stefan can learn more about them, he receives a letter from his former commander, Lord Ruford, ordering him to offer his services to King Gilberth. Princess Aleswina, the king’s intended, has disappeared from an abbey where she’d been consigned (although she actually escaped to avoid marrying Gilberth). Stefan will need all his battle-won wiles to track down Aleswina. This third book in author Linden’s planned five-volume Druid Chronicles sets up what’s to come. Few of the previously introduced characters make appearances. Instead, as the title suggests, this is Stefan’s story. The reader discovers his backstory and how it weaves into his current quest. Jonathan is also an intriguing addition whose ongoing storyline, which involves fighting no shortage of bandits, will have to be wrapped up in a future book. What is somewhat frustrating, however, is that only one storyline gets resolved in these 350-plus pages. Yet Linden successfully keeps adding to the fascinating world she has created.
Richly develops an important player and propels a winning series.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781647426286
Page Count: 368
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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