A quick-moving seaside mystery with a rich setting populated by characters readers won’t soon forget.
In Highet and Jones’ historical novel, a newly orphaned teenage girl is sent to live with her estranged aunt half a country away.
The year is 1929. Raised on a hardscrabble plot in Nebraska, 16-year-old Emily Cartwright is your typical farm girl—she can slaughter chickens, build a barn, you name it—until the untimely death of her mother, Constance, leaves her parentless. Without any other options, she is sent off to live with her estranged aunt, Isabel, on remote Martha’s Vineyard. The seaside New England setting is a shock to Emily’s system, as is her aunt’s house, which is also home to a small Irish family of servants, including the housekeeper’s daughter, Fiona—another teenage girl, and Emily’s first friend out East. Things at the Isabel Hewett home—known as “Hydrangea House”—are tense for several reasons, not the least of which is that Isabel had a daughter—also named Emily—who disappeared one day a few years prior while fishing. (Though some of her personal effects were later found, she has never been located.) The “First Emily,” as she is known, is not the only person to go missing at sea in this novel: Isabel’s close friend Ann Simpson has disappeared while out for a routine sail, and Isabel is convinced foul play is afoot. As Emily wonders how she will pass her days in her new home, Isabel recruits her to serve as something like a private detective on Ann’s case, which will thrust her into the depths of the Prohibition-era rum-running world. Highet and Jones’ setting is rich with both temporal and geographic details, and some of the best writing conveys Emily’s early, fish-out-of-water impressions of New England: “She was repelled by the angles and alleys, the denseness of the architecture disappearing into the sea mist and coming night. It was all just too strange and close together.” With a compelling “whodunit” aspect to the narrative and a protagonist both lovable and memorable, this work is a strong entry in the historical fiction genre.
A quick-moving seaside mystery with a rich setting populated by characters readers won’t soon forget.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9798888247143
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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