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
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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