A diverting SF romp with touchpoints of Victorian/Edwardian history and popular media.
In Piggott’s historical SF novel, an airship crew of outlaw freedom fighters opposes evil schemes by Thomas Edison to build a global corporate empire.
The author envisions an epochal meeting in the late 19th century between visionary author Jules Verne and young inventor Nikola Tesla to pool their ideas and create mechanistic miracles made possible by an alien element (“Uriel”) found in fragments shed by a passing comet that provides a seemingly inexhaustible power source. Now, in 1907, a transformed Earth’s skies are crisscrossed by airships, and there are steam-power-armored warriors, cybernetic limbs, punch-card “Thinking Machines,” and other steam- and battery-based technological wonders. The ruthless and amoral Thomas Edison leads a cabal of industrial elites who want to rule the world absolutely—and possibly incite a global Great War between Germany, Britain, and France to bring this about. Opposing them are Tesla’s “Vernians,” among them a flying fleet of rogues tagged as “pirates” (though a Robin Hood comparison is more apt). The most prominent is a mysterious figure nicknamed Corsair, whose multicultural team on the airship Galeru includes a blind Australian Aboriginal navigator and an Asian who styles herself a samurai. The pirates’ sophisticated intel network indicates that Edison’s corporation is developing a nuclear bomb, and the key is harvesting Uriel fragments. A cache may reside in the sacred lands of the Apache Nation in the American West, so the chase is on. The clever and somewhat overstuffed narrative features cameos by or references to real-life figures such as Geronimo, Pancho Villa, Teddy Roosevelt, Jack the Ripper, Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, Buffalo Bill, and Mata Hari in addition to characters out of fiction, like ancestors of the Corleone crime family. The heroes and their foes indulge in much speechmaking, even in their duels to the death; fatalities are mostly limited to the numerous “Pinkerton” mercenary troops in the pay of the villains. The narrative should certainly please the steampunk SF readership, especially those fond of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen cross-media franchise.
A diverting SF romp with touchpoints of Victorian/Edwardian history and popular media.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781959860075
Page Count: 301
Publisher: Curious Corvid Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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