Charming and placid.
A young woman who dreams of being an astronomer wants nothing to do with marriage.
Lady Wilhelmina Bettesford is 24 years old and firmly on the shelf—by design. She plans to move to the countryside with her widowed aunt, leaving London and the dreary demands of the aristocracy behind. One evening, while attempting to observe the stars from a bridge, she is “rescued” by barrister Bram Townsend, who thought she was planning to jump to her death. Bram and Wilhelmina feel an instant connection but assume they will never see each other again. Then, Wilhelmina’s plans go awry when her father arrives home with Alethea, his new 19-year-old bride. Although Wilhelmina expects the girl to be an evil stepmother, Alethea is a complex and interesting character, albeit one who is determined to find Wilhelmina a husband. When the family attends a fundraiser for the Devenaugh Home for Destitute Boys, Wilhelmina finds herself face to face with Bram. He and his four best friends were raised in the orphanage and support the institution, hoping to make life better for the abandoned children living there. Alethea suggests that Bram should pretend to court Wilhelmina, which will make her a more attractive prospect to the men of her own titled class. They agree, each for their own reasons: Bram hopes to be promoted to judge, and he can use the scheme to make connections to London’s elite, while Wilhelmina hopes to keep the suitors at bay until she comes into her inheritance. The plot is a sweet, slow burn with no conflict, just two people who gradually figure out they are perfect for each other. Bram and Wilhelmina must each reevaluate their long-held beliefs about marriage and partnership with the help of friends and family who recognize they are meant to be together.
Charming and placid.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-322418-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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