A dense but revealing look at a biblical figure.
Austin presents a historical novel on the life of Caiaphas, a high priest of Israel who was portrayed in the New Testament as being involved in the plot to kill Jesus.
Joseph Caiaphas, the 10-year-old son of a temple guard named Abel, is a bright boy who’s “eager to learn, eager to please,” and has an impressive talent for memorizing passages from Scripture. But all is not well in ancient Israel, which is under the control of the Roman Empire—a situation that a group of Jewish rebels, known as the Zealots, openly oppose. Religious leaders have some sympathy with the Zealots, as many in the priesthood “had long suffered the indignity of having to share power with a rotating roster of Roman governors and kings.” When the Romans send legions from Syria with orders to stop a potential rebellion, violence quickly breaks out, and Abel dies in the scuffle. Joseph later marries a woman named Rivkah, and he becomes a “priest of Jerusalem, ready and willing to serve.” In due time, he ascends to the position of high priest, and he’s in charge when Jerusalem gets a new Roman governor named Pontius Pilate, whose insensitivity to local beliefs causes friction with the Jewish people. Around this time, a “troublemaker” from Galilee named Jesus also causes a stir. Austin’s novel effectively creates a full and detailed picture of Caiaphas’ time before, during, and after his infamous interactions with Jesus, particularly in his position as a religious leader; for instance, he’s shown to be the only one allowed to enter the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, and he must perform such acts as sprinkling “the blood of the bull that had been sacrificed” in order to continue tradition. The account of his coming-of-age, however, feels overly lengthy and includes portions that don’t reveal much to the reader, such as how he enjoyed sitting on the roof with Rivkah. After Jesus enters the picture, though, the reader gets a fresh and insightful perspective on how Caiaphas’ instinct to always be “ready and willing to serve” led to some fateful decisions.
A dense but revealing look at a biblical figure.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9798218813581
Page Count: 390
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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