A strong historical romance for fans of bluestocking love stories.
A lady mathematician conducts a scandalous experiment.
It’s not Miss Myrtle Allen’s fault that she’s not married yet. She’s had at least 27 proposals, but none of those men understand Babbage’s Table of Logarithms or are likely to tolerate her supposedly “difficult to deal with” self. Her brother the Viscount is on the verge of giving her an ultimatum when an opportunity presents itself in the form of Mr. Simeon Jones, an artist with a scandalous reputation who needs to make a sudden departure from her family’s country house. She will abscond with him to London in order to prove that she can support herself using her prodigious math skills; Simeon agrees to take the unusual woman with him mainly because she offers to pay and he’s desperate for funds, but also because he’s a softie. Despite experiencing both attraction and opportunity on their illicit trip, it’s not until he drops her at her family’s London home that she dares to ask for a kiss. And when Myrtle opens the front door, she finds that her time in London is about to unfold a bit differently than expected, and she’ll need to call on her only friend in the city for help: Simeon. The third book in Frampton’s School for Scoundrels series features yet another hero who’s got a lot to prove alongside a heroine who doesn’t quite fit in with society and doesn’t care to, both of which Frampton continues to write well. The plot is a bit contrived, but that’s easy to overlook thanks to the refreshing heroine, who shines throughout, especially in several skillfully developed scenes featuring the inexperienced Myrtle unabashedly enjoying the benefits of learning about sex from a rake. As the Bastard Five make only brief appearances in this volume, it can easily be read as a stand-alone, but the book will be enjoyable for fans of the series as well.
A strong historical romance for fans of bluestocking love stories.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780063224292
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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