A riveting take on a ghoulish subgenre, featuring a well-crafted cast and vivid setting.
Soldiers in ancient Egypt battle hordes of the undead in Moon’s historical horror novel.
Military commander Koshei outranks his younger brother Tyfon, an infantry captain. The two have spent their lives bickering, but they excel in their respective leadership roles and successfully protect their homeland of Kemet from invaders. However, when they interrogate one of these recent invaders—a woman named Doryah—she explains that her tribe was actually running away from a “darkness” has been making bodies rise, walk, and kill. Pharaoh Ramesses III sends the brothers to track down the source of this darkness, and they gather soldiers and priests, as well as Doryah and her fellow tribeswoman Yaga, so they can search along the Nile in reed boats. Any skepticism they may have quickly dissipates when they’re faced with a “stumbling” mass of bodies that won’t stay down. Koshei, Tyfon, Doryah, and Yaga, as they fight to stay alive, must discover what is behind this evil before it reaches Kemet. Moon’s debut tale delivers exposition and character development at an impressive pace. The siblings, for example, don’t get along as kids and take divergent paths into adulthood; Koshei, unlike loner Tyfon, is a family man. Similarly, the ancient culture is deftly woven into the narrative; Doryah, who hails from what is now Central Europe, has trouble understanding the brothers until Koshei, testing different languages, finds one she knows. Suspense fuels scenes of encounters with the undead; Koshei and the others not only learn how to deal with the threat as they go along, but are also set on wiping it out, despite the odds. Lighter touches offset the story’s generally grim tone, from modern-sounding exclamations incorporating ancient elements (“What in Ahemait’s gullet is that?”) to occasionally playful descriptions, such as a reference to one of the undead as a “not-person.”
A riveting take on a ghoulish subgenre, featuring a well-crafted cast and vivid setting.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798891328778
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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