An earnest and poignant bildungsroman.
A young woman leaves home in search of her family during the Civil War in Ehrlich’s debut historical novel.
In 1865, 15-year-old Ellis Cady lives alone in her Western Tennessee home. Her father and Walter, one of her brothers, left two years prior to sell some horses but haven’t returned. Her twin brother, Earl, left shortly afterward to look for them, and then Ellis’ mother died. One day, Ellis makes the decision to leave home with a few belongings and her beloved horse, Billie. She first stops at her friend’s house, only to find it abandoned, before making her way down a trail where she discovers her brother Earl, who has sad news but doesn’t know where their father is. The two get caught up in a Civil War battle, during which Ellis is grazed by a bullet. She awakens in the care of Libby, a Cherokee woman who’s riding with a diverse group of men. Later, after stopping in Jamestown, Missouri, she finds her uncle’s ranch, where she learns more about her family and becomes more determined to locate her father, certain that he’s still alive. Ehrlich’s prose is accessible and spare and particularly skillful at describing the harsh reality of war and its battlegrounds: “Fragments of bone and skull escaped earth’s hollow grasp….A large ribcage, still covered by thin hide. Another and another.” The story simultaneously highlights the loneliness and camaraderie that can be found during wartime. Additionally, Ellis’ coming-of-age adds a personal layer to the battle-laden background, as when she spies Libby making love with her husband and encounters previously unknown feelings. Although the story is earnest and often compelling, there are a lot of scenes of Ellis simply wandering and riding from place to place, which may not interest readers who prefer more action. Still, Ehrlich’s story of a girl surrounded by loss and death as she searches for her family is engaging and makes for a quick, heartfelt read.
An earnest and poignant bildungsroman.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2022
ISBN: 9798985997408
Page Count: 255
Publisher: Bay Feather Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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