A fascinating series entry that focuses on complicated but bloodless intrigues.
The latest in Taylor’s Second Son series finds the king dealing with rogue lords and malicious cardinals.
Taylor’s series follows Alfred, a 14th-century nobleman, on a host of adventures—including seeing his brother rise to the throne, surviving a plague, war with other kingdoms, and becoming king himself. In this latest installment, Alfred has returned from war in the Kingdom Across the Southern Sea. There, King Charles had been tortured as the Teutons’ prisoner. Alfred helped forge a truce with the Teutons and replaced Charles with the young Denis of Aleffe. Now back home, he faces the problem of the greedy Lord Hugo Meriden, who’s been raising rents and driving people from their homes. The most feasible solution is to find “any other possible heir to the estate with a legitimate claim.” A dilemma closer to Alfred’s heart involves his eldest daughter, 15-year-old Juliana. While it would benefit the kingdom for her to marry a neighboring prince, she’s in love with Lord Ernle’s son Rainard. Meanwhile at the Christian monastery, Prior Dunstan rules with an obsessive hand, bringing oppression to the order. As always, Alfred meets these challenges with the aid of his grandfather’s wisdom, learned years ago when nobody suspected Lord Edward’s second son would sit upon the throne. But what happens when Alfred makes an enemy of God? The seventh installment of Taylor’s historical series ably addresses aspects of medieval rule rather than warfare. Alfred juggles several problems in this swiftly moving narrative in which even tertiary characters, like the stable hand, are well imagined. The writing consistently suits the scene; here, Alfred recalls his grandfather’s warm advice: “Don’t neglect...the things that calm your mind and soothe your soul.” Taylor uses the final third to limn a timeless issue—corruption in the church. In the end, the resolutions satisfy while hinting at further complexity on the horizon.
A fascinating series entry that focuses on complicated but bloodless intrigues.Pub Date: April 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68433-924-2
Page Count: 241
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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