A thoroughly researched and realized novel, but one that’s hampered by excessive exposition.
In the concluding volume of Bracewell’s historical fiction trilogy, Emma of Normandy tries to salvage a kingdom from impending conquest.
It’s the year 1012, and Emma, the Queen of England, occupies a precarious seat of power. Her joyless marriage helped to create an unsteady alliance between her brother Richard, the Duke of Normandy, and her husband, King Æthelred, “a suspicious, vengeful man.” However, Emma is drawn to Athelstan, the king’s son by his first wife; the two have already once “surrendered to temptation that had long been held in check.” When Thorkell, a Danish warlord, pledges loyalty and troops to England, the threat of Danish invasion seems less significant, but Swein, the King of Denmark, sees a path to conquest in the north, where England may not be as secure as Æthelred believes. Soon, the Danes are sacking English towns, one after another. Æthelred’s lack of response may lead to his downfall, but Emma’s fate, and those of the people she loves, is less certain. Bracewell presents a colorful cast of heroes and schemers, including Cnut, Swein’s savvy son; Eadric, Æthelred’s ruthless son-in-law; and the ambitious Elgiva, once Æthelred’s mistress and now Cnut’s concubine, who waits to avenge the death of her father and brothers. The narrative bounces between the English and the Danes as Bracewell doggedly lays out their competing agendas. However, the novel’s faithfulness to historical detail and exposition can cause the plot to sputter and stall at times, as the author seizes every chance to rehash past events or drop in new backstory. For instance, when Elgiva reunites with Alric, an ally, the action pauses: “Her mind was suddenly flooded with memories of him,” Bracewell writes, before going through their shared history—a strategy that saps the narrative tension. Still, the depth and scope of this book is impressive, and the steady prose keeps things even-keeled amid choppy seas of intrigue and upheaval.
A thoroughly researched and realized novel, but one that’s hampered by excessive exposition.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-942209-81-2
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Bellastoria Press LLP
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2021
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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