A strong start to a new Victorian romance series.
A practical lady is unexpectedly charmed by a louche lord.
Lady Diantha Courtenay spends her days following the rules and being practical—it’s the only way to balance out the impulsive and often irrational behavior of her parents, who since Halley’s Comet appeared in the sky more than 20 years ago, have pledged to do whatever they please. But she’s made an exception tonight, staying up late to attend a dear friend’s wedding, where she finds herself attracted to a man who looks like “the embodiment of a fallen angel in a painting”—and decides to kiss him even after realizing he’s the son of her father’s mortal enemy. For Lord Lucian Eldridge, second son of the Duke of Waxford, the encounter is not unusual; as the spare, he feels it’s his duty to enjoy life to the fullest, so a secret kiss with a beautiful woman is nothing new. But the next morning, as Diantha resolves to return to her practical self, Lucian learns that his older brother has had a hunting accident in Scotland, and while his overbearing father heads up there, Lucian will need to become more involved with the family’s affairs. This horrifies Lucian, though he’s intrigued to discover that those affairs include resolving a long-standing lawsuit between his family and Diantha’s, something the two will have to work on closely together. Due to their intense attraction, they find it hard to focus on the task at hand, and a steamy bout or two of “system-cleansing” at locations like the British Museum serve only to make them even more confused about who they are becoming, both on their own and together, and what the future might hold. Frampton is in fine form at the start of her new Heirs and Spares series, fleshing out the opposites-attract story with witty dialogue and complex characters. The instant chemistry between Lucian and Diantha catalyzes both to finally consider extracting themselves from their very different families, and accordingly the plot focuses on their individual development as much as their burgeoning relationship. Readers looking for a well-constructed, satisfying historical romance will be pleased.
A strong start to a new Victorian romance series.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780063389205
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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