A heartfelt but awkwardly executed tale of supernatural revenge.
In McLaughlin’s novel set in the 16th century, a girl must take matters into her own hands when she’s caught up in a murderous conspiracy.
In 1500s Scotland, as more and more women are being accused of witchcraft, 12-year-old Amaranth’s parents are brutally murdered. She’s sent to live at the nunnery that owns her father’s land, but before she moves in, Amaranth visits her home one last time. An ancient, powerful witch intercepts her, gives her a vial of her own powerful blood, and tells her to mix their bloods together under a full moon to unlock supernatural powers: “Amaranth, beware, the world is a cold place. First, it takes your soul and then, when you are least ready, your body! But you need not be a victim of this misery if you live as a supernatural.” Amaranth, bemused and overwhelmed, hides the vial near her parents’ graves. At the nunnery, she befriends Lady Janet Douglas, a noble trying to fight against unjust witchcraft charges; Amaranth studies law in her late teens and becomes a legal advocate to help Lady Janet defend women caught up in the government’s unjust campaign. Meanwhile, she investigates her uncle Michael, who seems to be involved the government’s work, and who possibly had a role in her parents’ deaths. Eventually, tragedy strikes, and Amaranth uses the vial of blood in a transformational bid to enact revenge. Amaranth is an appealing hero, and McLaughlin’s care for her shines through. Many of the secondary characters, including Lady Janet, are also well-drawn, and readers will enjoy rooting for them. Overall, the author delivers a tale that’s packed with ideas, especially about witchcraft panics of centuries past. However, these themes don’t always get enough room to breathe. More details about the real-life historical aspects of the setting would have been welcome, as it’s not always easy to tell when elements are anachronistic. The heightened prose style sometimes verges into melodrama, and often the narration explicitly states what something means or how a character feels, even when it’s obvious from context.
A heartfelt but awkwardly executed tale of supernatural revenge.Pub Date: June 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781038320476
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2025
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
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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