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
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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