A diverse range of vivid characters brings human faces to a historical protest march.
A landmark 1915 protest for women’s suffrage is the setting for the dozen short stories in this rousing anthology.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women’s right to vote. These stories by writers known for historical fiction focus on an event five years before, a march in New York City by 25,000 supporters of suffrage, “a three-mile-long argument for women’s rights.” Several of them bring to life real people; among the strongest is Jamie Ford’s “Boundless, We Ride.” Its protagonist is Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese-born suffragist who would become the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from Columbia. Ford makes her a fiercely determined figure with a surprising, and touching, inspiration. The only story not set in New York is “American Womanhood” by Dolen Perkins-Valdez; its first-person narrator is Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the Black suffragist and early civil rights leader. At home in Chicago, she recalls a humiliating event at a 1913 march, an example of racism that seems all too current a century later. Some historical characters recur, like the millionaire Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont. She’s an imposing but remote presence in Katherine J. Chen’s “Siobhán,” which focuses on one of her housemaids; in Fiona Davis’ “The Last Mile,” Alva is a conflicted and more human main character. Other stories are built around fictional characters, many of them immigrants. In Christina Baker Kline’s “The Runaway,” Kira, a homeless 12-year-old from Ireland, sees the march as a gateway to her future and freedom. But for Ani, the Armenian refugee in Chris Bohjalian’s “Just Politics,” the protest triggers her worst memories of the political massacre that took her entire family. One character, irrepressible 7-year-old Grace, appears in “A First Step” and then pops up in many other stories, wearing a “Miss Suffragette City” sash and recording the scene with a Brownie camera.
A diverse range of vivid characters brings human faces to a historical protest march.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-24133-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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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