A gripping saga that roots excruciating betrayals in a nation’s tragic history.
Italy’s buried wartime secrets lead to shocking violence in this labyrinthine historical mystery.
Martini’s novel, based on a real incident, centers around a July 1945 massacre in which left-wing partisans murdered a group of alleged Fascists imprisoned in the town of Schio in northeastern Italy. At the story’s heart is a memoir recounting the investigation of the crime by Lieutenant John Casanova of the United States Army, who combs through possible motives that might include revenge for Fascist atrocities, personal vendettas, and a communist plot to start an insurrection. His sleuthing unearths murky relationships between partisan leader Giulio Moro, pro-Fascist businessman Ettore Godin (who was shot but survived), and Renzo Balbo, the partisan who Godin says shot him. Casanova, an Italian-American who despises Italy, probes disdainfully into the corruption and violence but eventually stoops to unconscionable methods—think beatings and cockroaches—in his quest for answers. The novel then shifts to Balbo’s account of the Italian Army’s disastrous retreat from Stalingrad in January of 1943, an ordeal of frostbite, carnage, cannibalism, and betrayal that he endured with Moro and Godin. Framing the novel is the present-day narrative of Alessandro Lago, an Italian journalist who discovers among his dying father’s papers a photograph of Balbo, Moro, and Godin on the Russian Front alongside his uncle Alessandro; the picture entangles him with a mysterious woman who leads him to Casanova’s and Balbo’s writings and neo-Fascist politics. Martini writes in three distinctive registers, switching between Lago’s moody, atmospheric meditation on blighted lives, Casanova’s noirlikedetective story, and Balbo’s grisly, surreal war epic. (“[A] mortar [shell] land[ed] not twenty meters from me, hitting a sled full of injured men and I could see parts of them, pieces of their bodies fully formed cartwheel into the air…I felt that wave of bone and meat rip into my face like shrapnel.”) Martini’s storytelling is vivid and gripping, and his writing reads like lean, muscular poetry. The result is a terrific read with real psychological depth beneath the hard-bitten prose.
A gripping saga that roots excruciating betrayals in a nation’s tragic history.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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.
