An enthralling work that captures the moral murkiness of war.
Calland’s historical novel chronicles four strangers whose lives intersect at a prison camp for Confederate soldiers near the end of the Civil War.
In 1877, more than a decade after the conclusion of the Civil War, Lettie Waudell travels from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Elmira, New York, to unravel a mystery that haunts her: Why did her deceased husband, Archie Prentiss, have in his possession a ring clearly made for another woman? The other woman in question is Charlotte Ballarton, who met Archie, a Confederate soldier, while he was incarcerated at Elmira Civil War Prison Camp, a brutal place that subjected its inmates to “barbarous” and “inhumane treatment.” From the unusual connection between Archie and Charlotte (she was a committed abolitionist whose brother, Tim, had died at Antietam), the author spins a fascinating tale told in turns by four different characters, including Charlotte, Archie, John Jones (a fugitive slave who ends up in charge of burying dead Confederate soldiers at the prison camp), and Eli Stoddert (a farmer’s son and prison guard who becomes infatuated with Charlotte). With extraordinary subtlety, Calland captures the profound moral complexity of the war. Archie, a carpenter by trade, joins a war that was simply unavoidable for him—slavery was not an institution to which he was ideologically attached: “To be honest, I wasn’t real sure how I felt about it all. Never gave all that much thought to slavery, the right or wrong of it. It was just somethin’ I grew up with, like the smell of the pine forest or the snakes and mosquitos around Ashpole Swamp.” Charlotte’s rancor is not merely political or idealistic—she is torn apart by the death of the brother she adored. At the heart of this moving novel is the exploration of a remarkable emotional possibility: developing empathy for another who was formerly reviled. This is a stunning literary feat—intelligently composed and historically rigorous, the book leaves the reader haunted by the heights and depths of human nature.
An enthralling work that captures the moral murkiness of war.Pub Date: June 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781977260628
Page Count: 536
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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