A captivating tale of survival and love full of rich period details.
A dancing girl weathers exile, palace intrigues, and horrendous childbirths on her way to becoming queen of Cambodia in this historical romance.
Whitfield sets her engrossing novel in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, when Kampuchea under the historical King Jayavarman VII encompassed Cambodia and much of Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. Centering the story is Preah Chan Bopha, a peasant girl who is a prodigy of Apsara, a dance form with stately footwork and intricate hand gestures. Recruited for the royal dance troupe, Bopha is whisked off to Apsara school in the capital Angkor just months before her family is killed by foreign invaders. After years of studying, performing, and swooning over the handsome king, she is summoned to the palace to become Jayavarman’s lover and, eventually, he promises, his fourth wife. Unfortunately, Jayavarman takes offense at a stray remark of hers and exiles her to a village. There, a hellish pregnancy culminates in an agonizing delivery in the middle of a thunderstorm during which a falling tree crushes her house. Mother and twin boys pull through thanks to a midwife and the Hindu eagle god Garuda, whose voice reassures Bopha in times of trouble. A contrite Jayavarman recalls her to Angkor for a wedding in which she parades to the altar atop an elephant. But Queen Bopha faces more challenges, including the enmity of the senior queen and an attempt on the king’s life. Whitfield’s well-observed portrait of medieval Khmer culture explores everything from cuisine—staples include dried fish and crickets—to the brusque funerals in which the deceased is tossed into a ravine and devoured by vultures. But there’s also a universality to Bopha’s experiences: grieving loved ones; discovering sex and motherhood; learning to assert herself in a man’s world. Whitfield conveys all this in limpid prose that conjures poetic insights out of simple details. (“I only saw my mother smile once….The rice was boiling and she moved it to where the coals weren’t so hot. Then she just squatted there, her face soft. She was far, far away. Then, I saw it. She smiled. It lit up her face….Maybe she had been beautiful at one time, before marriage, before children.”) The result is a nice blend of striking setting and resonant pathos.
A captivating tale of survival and love full of rich period details.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2021
ISBN: 9798784990266
Page Count: 433
Publisher: PonderosaSage
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Bailey hits it out of the park with her latest spicy romance.
Two ambitious athletes plus one fake-dating arrangement—what could go wrong?
Though it’s only his first season for the Boston Bearcats hockey team, Robbie Corrigan has a well-established reputation as a playboy. He’s got major skills on the ice, and he’s also much more likely to love ’em and leave ’em than he is to build any long, meaningful relationships. Naturally, he’s just met the one woman who seems completely resistant to his charm: Skylar Page, a Boston University softball pitcher. When they meet over a friendly Saturday morning baseball game, Robbie instantly makes a poor impression by bragging to his teammates about his latest conquest within Skylar’s hearing. He thinks she’s gorgeous, though, and when he sets his sights on her, he’s surprised that she doesn’t seem to know it. Despite her initial distaste for Robbie, Skylar grudgingly confesses that she could use his help. If they pretend to date, maybe her current crush—her brother’s best friend—will finally sit up and take notice of her in a romantic way. The timing is less than ideal, since Robbie will have to team up with Skylar in the Page family’s latest wilderness competition, but it turns out that Robbie’s willingness to play fake boyfriend stems from some very real feelings. He wants to prove to her that he’s a changed man, and redeeming himself in her eyes starts with making sure she knows that she can really trust him. The latest addition to Bailey’s Big Shots series is a sexy, feel-good romance brimming over with the author’s trademark humor and dirty talk. While Skylar and Robbie’s dynamic doesn’t quite reach the level of enemies-to-lovers—he’s so head-over-heels for her that there’s no room for any real mean-spiritedness—their playful snark doubles as a welcome dash of foreplay in the lead-up to some seriously steamy scenes. Robbie’s efforts to show Skylar that he’s turned over a new leaf also result in some of the book’s best moments, emphasizing his commitment to becoming the type of man he knows she deserves.
Bailey hits it out of the park with her latest spicy romance.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780063380837
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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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