A compelling tale that explores the historical development of the Midwest.
An epic novel dramatizes the origins of an Illinois community.
In this second volume of his American Trilogy (following A Panther Crosses Over, 2022), Foster traces the settling and growth of Beardstown, Illinois, from Tom Beard’s purchase of riverfront property in 1818 through the end of the 1860s. Illinois is still a territory when Beard finds the perfect location to set up a ferry that carries settlers heading west across the river while encouraging some of them to stay and provide the infrastructure for his dream town. Beard builds relationships and makes alliances, and Beardstown prospers. He marries, but after many years of taking a back seat to Beard’s ambitions, his wife, Sara, leaves him for a riverboat gambler. The town’s other key founders—Chaubenee, a member of the Potawatomi Nation; Murray McConnel, a lawyer and politician; and Francis Arenz, a German immigrant and businessman—make up Beard’s chosen family, and they support one another through the challenges of weather, politics, technological innovations, and financial crises that make up the middle decades of the 19th century. By the 1860s, Beard and the other founders have died. But the town continues to thrive in the hands of a new generation, with salon—and bordello—owner Vivienne de Villiere, a transplanted Southerner, serving as the main protagonist in the book’s final chapters. Foster has a deep knowledge of the history of both the region and the era, and his well-developed characters transform a timeline of events into a captivating tale. Cameos by Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, and Wyatt Earp (plus Jefferson Davis, who, Foster acknowledges in an author’s note, is undocumented but plausible) situate the narrative amid the more famous events in American history without giving short shrift to the smaller stories that are the novel’s focus. The book is both informative and engaging, with solid pacing and engaging dialogue that keep the plot moving steadily over its half-century timeline.
A compelling tale that explores the historical development of the Midwest.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Agave Americana Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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