A lavishly detailed, disturbing, and addictive read, well-stocked with historical nuggets.
A young enslaved Black boy is gifted by King Louis XV to his favorite mistress in Flinn’s historical novel.
In the year 1771, after having been subjected to months of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by his abductors, a terrified 10-year-old boy (who will eventually be christened Louis-Benoit Zamor) is brought to the palace of Versailles. He arrives starving and dressed in rags, with no idea of where he is. This novel details the life of that young child, who is raised as a personal page to Madame du Barry, the king’s “favorite,” who, in adulthood, will be labeled a traitor. Zamor, as he is called, is washed, dressed in royal finery, and brought to meet his mistress. Narrating his own story, Zamor describes Madame’s joy when he is presented to her: As she opens her arms to him, “She smelled like flowers, and I let myself give in to the embrace, feeling tears spring to my eyes. In her arms, I almost felt human again…” Moments later, Madame is presented with a second gift, a dog, which she receives with the same delight; “Twopets,” she declares with glee. This is Zamor’s first inkling of what it will mean to be a slave in the royal court, albeit one who is well fed, magnificently dressed, and highly educated. His mission over the next decades—leading to the storming of the Bastille—is to obtain his freedom. Flinn’s articulate, multi-layered portrayal of the period leading up to the French Revolution overflows with the feuds, intrigues, and duplicities of life among the royals. Her narrative, inspired by the life of the actual Zamor, is packed with the minutia of royal excesses, cruel indulgences, and depravities. Zamor is a powerful protagonist, a figure plagued by rage and skilled in revenge, but also capable of love and great acts of kindness. Often beaten and humiliated, he remains unbroken. With his finely honed talent for sarcasm, Zamor is a compelling social commentator on the evils of slavery and the tumult of the French Revolution.
A lavishly detailed, disturbing, and addictive read, well-stocked with historical nuggets.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Gilded Orange Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
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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