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
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
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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