An affecting love story that’s overpowered by historical anecdotes.
Sharp’s historical novel, based on true events, follows the trials and joys of a Black man and white woman struggling to survive in 1800s Pennsylvania.
Langhorn H. Wellings and Mary Stone meet while having lunch on her father’s farm, where he’s working as a hired hand. Their instant, mutual attraction will change the course of their lives. Mary, a pious, diligent young white woman of German descent, and Langhorn, a hardworking free Black man, are determined to build a life together. Despite the hostile reactions of Mary’s family and prevailing racist attitudes in the early 1800s, Mary and Langhorn marry and find acceptance in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where they raise children and find a sense of home. However, the shunning they face as an interracial couple, combined with the frequent loss and illness inherent to 19th-century life, gradually erode their happiness. After Langhorn faces tragedy in 1865, public sentiment turns vicious, and he’s unjustly accused of murder and must stand trial. Sharp is a descendant of the Stone family, and her research into her ancestry and the Bucks County community during the Civil War era is impressive in both depth and specificity. This retelling of a family history effectively attempts to position Langhorn and Mary’s marriage within a wider historical context. The author works hard to ground readers in the impact and devastation of the Civil War, alongside shifting national perspectives on race, slavery, and equality. This commitment sometimes leaves the novel feeling off balance and unfocused, however, since the numerous asides to provide biographies of historical figures and their offspring, or lists of birth and death dates, slacken the tension of Langhorn’s trial and draw attention away from the emotional depth of his marriage to Mary. Also, the decision to relay this text through two parallel timelines—with one following the development of Langhorn and Mary’s relationship and the other tracking fictional reporter Mahlon Riegel’s coverage of Langhorn’s trial—consistently shifts focus from the novel’s crucial, central romance.
An affecting love story that’s overpowered by historical anecdotes.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798991665711
Page Count: 590
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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