An often engrossing and well-handled story of the 19th century.
In this historical novel, McIlvain tells a tale of love lost and found during the colonization of Texas in the 1820s.
Susannah Mobley, the white daughter of a country farmer in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, is closer to the enslaved Mama Jess and her son, Philippe, than she is to her own parents. Enslaver Jacob Mobley is a cruel man who treats people, including his daughter, as commodities; Louisa Mobley is often dulled by laudanum. Between 1817 and 1821, the teenage Susannah and Philippe fall in love. Although he tells her that “I’m not strong enough to resist taking you,” she continues seeing him, and they eventually consummate their love out of wedlock. By the time she graduates from New Orleans’ Ursuline Academy in 1821, she’s pregnant with their child. Philippe flees to San Antonio de Béxar in Texas and gives her a ring made of intricately knotted strands of her dark red hair as a sign that he’ll love her forever. To shield Philippe, she claims that the pregnancy is the result of a rape by a runaway enslaved man whom Jacob’s dogs recently killed. Susannah is quickly married to Hezekiah James, a Tennessean on his way to stake a Texas property claim who knows about her pregnancy. During their arduous journey to Texas, they homestead on the Brazos River; Susannah comes to admire and even love Hezekiah for his kindness and leadership. In these pages, McIlvain tells absorbing love stories, but she also explores the interpersonal relationships between enslavers and enslaved people, some of whom grew up together; “We’re like brothers,” says Hezekiah to Mason, a man whom he and his family enslaved. Mason answers that he is, in fact, enslaved to Hezekiah, later adding, “Takes a lot of twisting, Hez, to come up with family.” McIlvain also effectively delves into the friendships that develop between disparate women in a new settlement. Well-known figures from Texas history, including Stephen Austin, Jared Groce, and Baron de Bastrop, make appropriate appearances that add to the book’s feeling of historical verisimilitude.
An often engrossing and well-handled story of the 19th century.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2023
ISBN: 978-4824189271
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Next Chapter
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
