A sincere environmental message is underserved by flawed storytelling.
The carving out of a railway branch line brings dramatic shifts to a rural English valley.
Set in the mid-19th century, Aronowitz’s novel vividly evokes the impact of the industrial revolution on a traditional community, as the new rail track is dug and blasted across the Herefordshire countryside. For 17-year-old Grace Matthews, a member of the Anti-Railway League and self-styled “guardian of the woods and fields who had to defend nature from attack,” this development, like “the factories, the coal-black smokestacks, the stagnating canals,” is ruining the natural world. It’s also adding to the fury she already feels towards her father, a doctor (and rail supporter) whom she blames for the death of her mother from breast cancer, and who now treats his daughter as an unpaid cook and maid. For Sean McClennan, one of the Irish navvies—laborers—doing the backbreaking physical work for the rail company, the job generates money to send back to Ireland, to help the faltering family farm. Inevitably, these two figures will experience mutual attraction and meet. Meanwhile, Grace has begun to punish her father, using her knowledge of herbalism to infect his snuff with hallucinogenic dried mushrooms, leading to manic episodes, and eventually to the novel’s second time stream, set some seven years later, which finds Grace incarcerated in Hereford’s Insane Asylum for her crimes against her parent. Although absorbingly detailed, the book’s narrative terrain is a tight and relatively static one which Aronowitz circles repeatedly—the timeless beauty of the natural world, the violent damage to the landscape, Sean’s homesickness and financial need, Grace’s anger. Moreover, Grace is a cool, rebarbative, and somewhat anachronistic figure. She spies on Sean at the navvies’ camp, boldly walks into his digs uninvited one day, and elsewhere calls an innkeeper a “stupid bigot.” The mismatched romance similarly lacks conviction, as does the tale’s abrupt, open-ended cessation.
A sincere environmental message is underserved by flawed storytelling.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781771839785
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Guernica World Editions
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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