A rich and memorable story of exploitation and reinvention.
A Navy officer parlays the discovery of an island castaway into a 19th-century roadshow in Liska’s debut historical novel.
The Pacific Ocean, 1856: At this late point in his career, Lt. Henry Aaron Bird would love to discover something not yet known, so when the USS Fredonia stops to gather water at a small island unmarked on the ship’s charts, he goes ashore in the hope that he might be the first man ever to set foot on this virgin land. Instead, he discovers the island is already occupied by a small, naked, girl of European stock. “Her lips were curled in a snarl and she made a frightened, unintelligible hissing noise,” observes Bird. “Blonde hair, bleached nearly white, hung in thick dirty clumps over the burnt edges of her scalp.” The girl does not speak, but graves elsewhere on the island suggest she is the last of a group of shipwrecked travelers. The ship’s surgeon dismisses the girl as an idiot, but Bird, though not formally educated, can tell she is not. Following the controversial death of another officer, Bird gains control of the girl—who eventually reveals that her name is Alice Kelly—and, following the end of the voyage, turns her into a traveling exhibit, “The Wild Girl of the Pacific.” As Alice confronts her traumatic past and Bird settles into his newfound prominence, both discover that America is a much stranger, harder place than Alice’s desert island. Liska’s prose captures a country that feels equally alien to the reader and to Alice herself: “The stage was just high enough that she could look out and see them all at once, a sea of heads and astonishing hats. When she was not on a stage, most people towered above her; she felt lost in a dark forest of moving figures.” The story largely eschews the sensationalism of Alice’s stage show, unfolding slowly to gradually reveal twin portraits of Americans lost in their second acts. Steeped in loneliness and 19th-century grandeur, the novel is a remarkable meditation on our unlikely migrations through space and time.
A rich and memorable story of exploitation and reinvention.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781949846720
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Heresy Press
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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