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
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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