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
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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