An entertaining romp, with a female protagonist who will constantly subvert readers’ expectations.
Croft’s homage to the classic Gothic novel follows a plucky heroine’s adventures.
The novel is set in the late-18th-century Regency period and centers on Renna, a confident waif who’s loosely attached to a “cotton house” in York, England. Renna is under the care of Camilla and is befriended by a burly and mysterious fellow named Donovan McGuiness, but she’s romantically drawn to a sailor named Capt. Henry Moore. Soon she and Camilla find themselves elevated to maid status at Harewood House, an estate where Renna loses her virginity (not unwillingly) to Capt. Moore. The book has a number of plot twists and characters, but with Donovan’s help, they escape to Venice, where Camilla’s sister, Danielle (aka “Mother”), grooms Renna to be a courtesan. Renna is not wild about her new occupation, but she’s good at what she does. Much intrigue follows, and by book’s end, as Venice falls to Napoleon’s army, Renna has a choice of three suitors: the young and idealistic Alistair, the buff and honest Donovan, or the aristocratic Capt. Moore. Readers might think she ends up making the worst choice possible, but perhaps the implied moral is that one learns more from bad choices than good. Croft strongly hints at a trilogy, based on the idea of “Maiden, Mother, Crone.” The book is a worthy tribute to Gothic literature, with surprising revelations at every turn, although the numerous surprises toward the end flirt with parody. All the ingredients are here: randy and arrogant aristocrats, grand manors with secret passageways, spunky young heroines, perverted clergy, secret potions, and madness and wretched asylums. The coming-of-age theme involves a young woman trying to make her way in a harsh world, with everything playing out amid the baroque trappings of the late 18th century. The writing can sometimes be eccentric and over-the-top (“Am I doomed to this life of chaos that befalls me?”), but on balance this is an engaging historical novel with plenty of melodrama to hold readers’ interest.
An entertaining romp, with a female protagonist who will constantly subvert readers’ expectations.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781962465403
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Historium Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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