A sprawling, engaging saga of two women making their ways through tumultuous American eras.
In Kanter St. Amour’s historical novel, a desperate lawyer finds inspiration in an ancestor’s diary.
San Francisco, 2019: Until recently, attorney Ellie Benvenuto was a rising star at one of the city’s top law firms. Unfortunately, the responsibilities of her home life led to her unceremonious dismissal. The older of Ellie’s two young sons, Luca, was diagnosed with several disabling conditions, and Ellie—who has held primary custody of the boys since her divorce—needed more time to see to Luca’s needs than the firm was willing to give. Now, she works for the Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative, where the paychecks are significantly smaller and the cases are more emotionally draining. Even with her neighbor and best friend, Anika Owens, to lean on, Ellie struggles to figure out how to provide for her family in a world that seems to despise women. When her grandfather dies, the diary of Ellie’s great-great-grandmother, Theodora Ellis, comes into her possession. Teddy (as Theodora was known) recorded her life in the 19th century, including her overland journey from Chicago to San Francisco, her marriage to Klondike miner George DeLuca, and her pioneering work as an architect, suffragist, and philanthropist. As Ellie takes on a tricky case representing an injured immigrant worker and begins a hesitant new relationship with handsome neurosurgeon Sam Varma, she follows Teddy’s chronicle, which includes details of Teddy’s (and her husband’s) polyamorous relationship with an Indigenous couple and accounts of Teddy dressing as a man in order to move in male spaces. (“He seemed to have his eyes turned upwards, looking practically at the ceiling and I realized that my hat probably does add at least a foot to my height,” recounts Teddy of a colleague responding to her attire. “He told me he had never seen a woman in a tuxedo. I said, ‘Well you have now!’”) Can Teddy’s experiences from more than a century ago help Ellie make sense of the possibilities of her own time?
The author’s descriptive prose is especially vibrant in the book’s Teddy sections, which sparkle with details of a former world. “The shaft I work currently goes 2,000 feet into the ground each day,” writes the woman of her days mining silver in Virginia City, Nevada. “I am lowered down like a rat in a bucket, straight into the mouth of the furnace. The heat is unbearable. The men work in overalls and nothing else, but I of course cannot take off my shirt.” The Ellie material is slightly duller by comparison, though Kanter St. Amour infuses her story with compellingly topical concerns about work, marginalization, and the struggles of parenthood. Though the narratives echo one another more than they directly interact, readers will draw the connections between Teddy’s eagerness to flaunt expectations for women in her own time and Ellie’s relatable struggles to lift up herself and the women around her. Thoughtful without ever losing its breezy pacing, this narrative will please readers of both contemporary and historical fiction.
A sprawling, engaging saga of two women making their ways through tumultuous American eras.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798992752816
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Pactum Factum Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2025
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
© 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.
