A richly textured portrait of old Santa Fe arranged around a flawed love story.
Well-bred Spanish sisters confront the rough-hewn culture and sexy cowboys of 18th-century Santa Fe in this period romance.
Following the deaths of their parents in a 1798 yellow fever epidemic, 21-year-old Sofia Alcantara y Pasqual and her 14-year-old sister, Valeria, travel from Veracruz to New Spain’s northern outpost of Santa Fe. They are to be governesses at a hacienda, but their main mission is to find husbands among the region’s single men. Despite their small dowries, their distinguished family background and general classiness as immigrants from old Spain guarantee them good prospects provided they maintain spotless reputations. Arriving at Rancho de las Palomas, they meet the kindly Don Emilio, who insists they teach the mestizo ranch hands’ kids as well as his own; his frosty wife, Doña Inmaculada, a racist religious fanatic who wants the ranch hands kept uneducated; and his cruel eldest son, Alfonso, who bloodies his horse with his spurs whenever he rides to Santa Fe. Then there’s the lanky ranch manager, Beto, Don Emilio’s bastard son by a Native American mistress, whose arrogant manliness infuriates and attracts Sofia. Sofia is appalled when Valeria falls in love with the loathsome Alfonso, but her own behavior is even more reckless. Sofia casually gives up her virginity when she and Beto shelter in a cave during a thunderstorm. After many more outdoor assignations, she gets pregnant. Yet despite Beto’s uncanny skill as a lover and persistent marriage proposals, she puts him off because he considers romantic passion to be destructive nonsense and views their union as a smart, stock-breeding move. The plot thickens as Doña Inmaculada levels witchcraft charges at a Native healer; Alfonso’s rivalry with Beto turns violent; and Sofia mulls unwed motherhood in a nunnery.
Sheehy’s yarn paints a well-observed, almost ethnographic portrait of life in what would become New Mexico, a place where gradations of race and class are marked but there is also much multicultural blending between Spanish and Native societies. (The local Pueblo Indians don’t see much difference between the Virgin Mary and their own Corn Goddess.) The novel also charts a transition in mores from religious obscurantism toward Enlightenment rationality and from citified polish and hauteur toward frontier earthiness and egalitarianism. And the collision between a refined daughter of privilege and a rustic mestizo who likes to talk frankly about sex suggests an antique, Spanish-flavored Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Some aspects of this feel contradictory and even anachronistic. Despite the insistent talk of dire reputational consequences for sexual transgressions, such indiscretions provoke ribaldry rather than condemnation. Nonprocreative acts that would have been thought sinful and repulsive back then are embraced by the blithely sex-positive characters. Sheehy’s prose is skillful and evocative in descriptive passages but doesn’t convey passion well. While the physical attraction between Sofia and Beto is ostensibly volcanic and multiorgasmic in the many lavish sex scenes, their relationship feels stilted, with Beto’s stolid dialogue—“ ‘Oh,’ he said, as if an afterthought, ‘your broad hips and your full breasts are not just well-suited for childbearing. They are beautiful to my eyes—and to my hands and to my other parts’ ”—usually killing the mood. Readers may be left wondering what the couple, aside from various body parts, really see in each other.
A richly textured portrait of old Santa Fe arranged around a flawed love story.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63363-523-4
Page Count: 262
Publisher: White Bird Publications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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
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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