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
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
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