An often fun and sometimes frightful story, although its retro ways feel rather simplistic.
In Stein’s debut historical fantasy novel, a French libertine lives to regret a Faustian bargain.
One winter evening in 1925, a young man bursts through the back door of a Philadelphia watchmaker’s shop and immediately falls unconscious on the floor. The German-born proprietor, Al Valentine, thinks that he recognizes the unconscious man from a long time ago—at least, he knows the man’s distinctive pocket watch. However, if he’s the person whom Al thinks he is, he hasn’t aged a day in decades. Al begins to read the book that he finds in the man’s overcoat; it turns out to be the diary of one Etienne Allard, a hedonist of belle epoque Paris. Etienne’s appetite for gambling, sex, and corrupting the chaste is so great that it earns him the sobriquet l’Hérétique. After his Sade-an ways finally leave him friendless and nearly destitute, Etienne loses his remaining funds on a high-stakes card game with a wealthy Russian named Kazakov. As Etienne begins plotting his impossible revenge, he receives an unexpected visitor: a bird who bursts into flames and then turns into a man—a demon who makes Etienne an infernal offer. Etienne can enjoy 70 additional years of youth and health and all the money he could ever want, but only if he delivers seven sinful souls to the demon. There, the diary ends, and by the time Al has finished reading it, the unconscious Etienne has woken up and vanished. When tragedy later strikes Al’s life and the young man reappears, the two form an alliance to help the latter escape his sinister agreement.
Over the course of this novel, Stein employs an ornate prose style that manages to replicate the tone and atmosphere of 19th-century gothic novels, even during the sections that are set in the 20th century: “A tortured cry, like the bawl of a dying animal, rang out. Al…hurried back to the foyer, following the wails of lament like a trail of audible breadcrumbs.” It’s a fun read, overall, with a leisurely pace that nevertheless locks the reader in with a slowly building sense of anticipation. The novel is a true pastiche, crafting an impressively detailed Faustian tale for its readers: “The terms, like the agreement, are simplicity itself,” claims the demon as he lays out his devilish terms. “Seven sins, seventy years. A décennie for each sin, no less.” However, it does so without ever commenting on the form in any meaningful way or updating it for the 20th century, let alone the 21st. Even its sense of morality and immorality will strike many readers as strikingly staid and traditional. As a result, many contemporary readers may find themselves bored by its old-fashioned manner, particularly given the work’s considerable length (more than 400 pages) and anodyne resolution. Readers who enjoy fiction of this particular European vintage, though, are sure to find much to delight them in this tale of depravity, exile, and redemption.
An often fun and sometimes frightful story, although its retro ways feel rather simplistic.Pub Date: April 9, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985716207
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Gray Area Press
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2022
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
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