Stripped-down language and propulsive storytelling keep these pages turning.
A rugged debut novel about a young man fleeing from a violent life.
The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency was a (real-life) vicious, predatory outfit dedicated to stamping out unions at the barrel of a gun. In this captivating debut novel we meet Jude Washer, a lost 24-year-old West Virginian who joined the group for all the wrong reasons (as if there could be right reasons). The year is 1922. Jude’s father had been a mean drunk and coal miner who pushed Jude’s 10-year-old brother to an early death. He was also a union organizer, and Jude, bent on not just destroying his dad but scorching the very earth he stood on, learned to see red when he saw unions. The problem is, Jude also has a soul, even though he tries to drown it with moonshine from his flask, and the Baldwin-Felts, generally speaking, do not. The book has some wonderfully chilling set pieces, including a horrific raid on a mining camp full of workers who are perfectly willing to shoot back. This is where Harvey Morgan, a new recruit Jude is training, decides he’s had enough, and Jude must decide if he’ll continue down his bloodstained path or look for something resembling atonement. This fork in the road is neither broad nor simple; the author tells her story through small actions and stripped-down language, building momentum one page at a time and foregoing big gestures. Her descriptions of the rugged land of the Blue Ridge Mountains ground the action in detail, carved out word by word. You care for Jude, a decent man doing the wrong thing, and when he flees his murderous colleagues with a badly wounded Harvey, you wants a new life for him, even when you know it won’t be easy and there’s a price to pay for past sins. This is rugged writing with a moral compass and a tarnished hero slowly trying to come clean.
Stripped-down language and propulsive storytelling keep these pages turning.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-938235-84-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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