A fun and finely evoked historical novel set in Plantagenet England.
A knight loses the king he was meant to guard in Taylor’s historical novel.
In England, 1327, Sir Guy Bickerstaffe has the worst job in the kingdom: guarding the deposed and imprisoned king, Edward of Caernarfon. It’s an awkward position for a man who considers himself a loyal, honorable, god-fearing knight—though, of course, he wouldn’t be a knight at all if it weren’t for Edward’s wife, Queen Isabella, who led the revolt to depose Edward in favor of one of their sons. Now, Guy and his small band of men-at-arms are responsible not only for keeping Edward captive, but also alive. “England had never deposed a king before—kings died of disease or in battle—and no one knew quite what to do with him… And Sir Guy wound up in the unenviable position of showing loyalty to his new king by serving as prison warden to the old one.” Guy’s least dependable soldier (and second cousin), Will Makepeace, befriends Edward, a fact that causes Guy to doubt the young man’s loyalty. When Edward and Will both disappear one night—leaving an unknown dead man in the king’s bed—Guy’s career and reputation are ruined. Guy swears vengeance against Will, a quest that will take him to France and back, and perhaps into the very pages of English history. Taylor’s prose creates a feel for the historical setting while still imbuing the story with a zippy sense of adventure: “Will had to leave the castle without anyone knowing. And there was only one way to do that. A tunnel led from the back of the brewhouse to a cesspit where they threw the spent mash, emptied the chamber pots, disposed of the offal from butchering, and tossed in any dead vermin found on the premises.” Based on a letter that posits a revisionist account of the life of Edward II, the book should please and surprise both readers familiar with this era and those encountering it for the first time.
A fun and finely evoked historical novel set in Plantagenet England.Pub Date: April 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781685133955
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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