Intriguing and enjoyable, with an engaging female protagonist.
Harold’s historical novel follows an American-expat Civil War widow living in Paris during its heady, La Belle Epoque days.
Anna Kneeland Haggerty Shaw came to Paris with her family close to 20 years ago. Now, in May of 1892, at 56 years of age, she finds herself for the first time totally on her own, no longer responsible for being the dutiful daughter or attentive aunt. It has been almost 30 years since Anna was widowed after barely three months of marriage—her husband Robert Gould Shaw died a hero, shot while commanding the 54th Massachusetts infantry, the Union’s first Black Negro regiment. At the conclusion of a Debussy piano recital, Annie hears a voice calling out her name. It is that of Julia Shaw Greene, Robert’s aunt, who Annie has not seen in many years, even though Julia is also an American expat living in Paris. It is a fortuitous meeting that leads to a close friendship. Julia introduces Annie to Henrietta Reubell’s salon, where wealthy intellectuals and art aficionados mingle joyfully and a bit mischievously with the struggling artists in search of patronage (“she attracts a rather fascinating circle”). Immersed in the buoyant, irreverent crowd, Annie sees the glimmer of a new path she can follow, one which may allow her to express her own artistic talents and participate in the freedoms that Paris has to offer. In Harold’s tender, frothy, and witty novel, populated by an eclectic group of Bohemian artists, Paris itself occupies a prominent role. When Annie learns that her dreaded former mother-in-law intends to visit and (gasp) perhaps move in next door, the humor is kicked up a few notches as Annie and her friends devise ways to shock the old lady into returning to America. Through acerbic social commentary and biting dialogue, the author takes readers on entertaining tours of artists’ studios and one or two dens of iniquity. Elaborate descriptions of the fashions, foods, and lifestyles that made Paris the center of the arts and social rebelliousness of the era are peppered throughout, along with thought-provoking pre– and post–Civil War historical tidbits.
Intriguing and enjoyable, with an engaging female protagonist.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781578691944
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
