An intelligent exploration of an impressively eventful and religious life.
A novel focuses on a Jesuit missionary who is devoted to the desert tribes of New Spain in the late 17th century.
Eusebio Chino is born in 1645 in the village of Segno in the “lush hills of Northern Italy.” From an early age, he is as “bored as the lizards sunning on the hot rocks and as restless.” Inspired by his cousin Martino Martini, a Jesuit missionary who traveled to faraway China, Eusebio longs to see the world. Educated by Jesuits—he attends a Jesuit college in Germany—he shows great promise as a scholar specializing in mathematics and cartography. But while terribly ill, he pledges to follow St. Francis Xavier should he recover, which he does miraculously. Eusebio keeps his word, becomes a missionary, and gets sent to New Spain—Mexico—to minister to the many tribes there. He changes his last name to Kino in order to assure it will be pronounced properly and tirelessly devotes himself to missionary work, a relentless sense of purpose poignantly depicted by Gregory. But Eusebio constantly finds himself at loggerheads with the Spanish military, which is only interested in silver and conquest, not the souls of the tribal members, for whom the missionary develops great affection. The author’s command of the history is impeccable, and she deftly portrays the tensions Eusebio navigates between winning the trust of suspicious tribes and chastening the brutality of the Spanish soldiers. At one point, he asserts: “My hope is to discover new lands and live peaceably with these tribes—and protect them from the Spanish. These tribes are much wiser than most think. They have a natural spiritual inclination that we can guide toward Christianity.” Gregory’s treatment is short on style—her unfailing lucidity is purchased at the price of any literary sensibility. The language can be bloodlessly earnest. Nonetheless, this is a historically rigorous and thoughtful portrait of an extraordinary man.
An intelligent exploration of an impressively eventful and religious life.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-947431-41-6
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Mentoris Project
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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