An ambitious, if unevenly executed, story about the fractured relationship between Indigenous Canadians and the national...
In Switzer’s novel, a charismatic legal researcher is chosen to lead Canada’s Congress of First Nations during a time of dire need.
A new leader is on the scene: Billy Favell, a Saskatchewan-based member of the Cree Nation and a survivor of the forced residential schools program, is a camera-ready chief who effectively took a crash course in politics while working for a lawyer in Ottawa. Eventually, he becomes leader of the Congress of First Nations. There are hundreds of reservations across the country whose needs are pressing, and their history is painful. Billy knows all this firsthand, but he’s still swept up in the national political scene, enticed by money and perks, and overwhelmed by controversies and demands of the job. He’s also a womanizer, and his spending habits are causing headaches, so a personal assistant, Peshu Butler, is hired by the Congress to run interference with critics and serve as “a combination bodyguard-chauffeur-confidant.” The worldly Peshu knows that the relationship between the tribes and the government is as if “victims of a holdup relied on the generosity of the gang who had robbed them to supply them with living expenses.” Meanwhile, Sarah Koostachin, an affiliate of the militant group Sons of Tecumseh, impresses Peshu with her forceful will to uplift Indigenous people. As Billy’s star rises, loyalties are tested and egos collide as calls for stronger policy positions in areas such as health care, education, land claims, and economic development grow louder. Switzer’s highly political, issue-oriented novel is awash in Canadian history, contemporary politics, and a multitude of social and infrastructure problems that plague the country’s First Nations population. He also nicely connects the past to the present through the story of Tecumseh and his modern-day urban namesakes. Bustling descriptions of national politics, tribes, and their leaders are all present; it’s a lot for one novel to tackle, and the political lessons sometimes come at the expense of a strong, driving plot. The characters feel true to life, and the knowledge they wield is invaluable. However, there may not be enough of a narrative arc to keep all readers engaged to the end.
An ambitious, if unevenly executed, story about the fractured relationship between Indigenous Canadians and the national government.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 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
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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