An imaginative, adventure-filled quest in an intriguing setting.
In Sorrell’s novel, set in the fourth millennium B.C.E., a spiritual teenage girl flees into nature to escape an arranged marriage.
Etana lives in an ancient North African culture in which patriarchs rule the household. When her father informs her that she’s to marry a man named Mogas, she’s not at all pleased with the prospect. Not only is Mogas much older than her, but Etana would be his third wife—and she’d likely be forced to endure a lifetime of cruel treatment from her husband and his other spouses. Etana has always felt connected to the spirit world, so when a ghost encourages her to flee her home, she listens. She makes her way into the harsh world of the wilderness beyond. The place is full of dangers, and not only from wildlife, such as lions; the threat of simply running out of water soon becomes a serious consideration. After Etana comes across a herd of elephants, she winds up befriending and taking care of them; eventually, she builds a hut and settles down among the animals. But her newfound freedom is soon interrupted by armed men led by Capt. Tuli, the son of King Apedemak, the ruler of Nubiin. Tuli has arrived to ask Etana if she’ll work for the king, who has a penchant for using elephants in his battle plans. He wants someone like Etana to assist him, particularly in bringing about the recuperation of a wounded bull elephant. “Even though you are a woman,” Tuli says, “if you save the elephant and train him, great rewards await you.” She knows the risks of working for the king, but she agrees to serve as an elephant whisperer in a milieu that’s starkly different from the animals she’s known.
The novel takes place in an era that’s rarely depicted in historical fiction, a time before the rise of the ancient Egyptian civilization; as Sorrell informs readers in an afterword, “Specific information surrounding Nubian religion ca. 3300 B.C.E. is largely unknown.” In the skilled author’s hands, it’s a world where a large river flows “to the end of the world and into the stars” and a daughter can be married off for the price of five pelts (although in Etana’s case, her father thinks he might be able to get six pelts, if he plays his cards right). The text also incorporates such beliefs as Etana’s devotion to a figure called the Beastgod, whom she sees as responsible for the “creation of animals, from lowly worm to great elephant.” It’s a multifaceted and likely unfamiliar environment that readers will be happy to explore, just as Etana herself does. To add to the intrigue, Etana faces troubles that go beyond simply controlling the king’s elephants. Not all of King Apedemak’s men are happy about her presence—one, in particular, even wants her dead. Everything comes to a head in a tense showdown. An imaginative, adventure-filled quest in an intriguing setting.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781968485382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mindstir Media
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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