Resolute women energize a remarkable, ongoing coming-of-age story.
In Barnes’ sequel, a teenage girl in ancient times is caught in the midst of a vicious rivalry for a tribe’s leadership.
In 4000 BCE, the Plānos tribe in the Pontic-Caspian steppe (modern-day Ukraine and southern Russia) loses its leader when Awos dies. His son, Potis, a clan chief and potential new Plānos leader, faces opposition from both another clan chief and his own cousin, who wants to oust Potis from his current position. A harsh winter has already depleted the livestock, making hunger a frightening possibility. But when raiders steal and mercilessly slaughter the remaining livestock, Potis suspects someone among his rivals has a hand in it. Meanwhile, Potis’ wife, Sata. and their 15-year-old daughter, Naya, return from the latter’s spiritual journey. During that time, Naya bonded with a red filly; she’s surprised that the clan has captured horses from the filly’s band and then horrified to learn they’re meant to be sacrificed to a god. It all stems from the general lack of animals for sacrifice, which is, in turn, another aspect of the battle for Plānos leadership. Potis wants to but can’t immediately make a move against the raiders, leading to serious tension within the clan. Does Wailos, the son of a rival of Potis’, have a genuine interest in marrying Naya, or is something else brewing? And will Naya feel obligated to marry him? Awos’ widow, Awija, is determined to help Potis and Naya, and a decidedly unhappy Sata contemplates bidding the clan, and likely her family, goodbye. Things take a crucial turn when Naya’s impending three-day vigil for her transition into adulthood finally arrives.
Barnes painstakingly develops the story’s female characters. The lives of Awija and Sata, for example, are paralleled; as Awija exerts an influence on events that most people are unaware of and Sata seemingly believes that her only choice is leaving everything behind, they’re both often at odds with men. Naya endures the worst of it, and she shows admirable strength while withstanding ruthless torment—mental and physical. The men are less interesting, ranging from static characters to interchangeable villains. This even includes Potis, who struggles to keep his clan and his family together, and Aytal, who met Naya in the previous series installment but, in this novel, is separated from her. They each face engaging difficulties that the story never fleshes out, opting instead to blame Potis, repeatedly, for troubles that he and others suffer. Still, the author masterfully clarifies the tribe’s customs and offers instances of its language, making it easy for readers to lose themselves in a narrative set millennia ago. Also, the prose paints colorful visuals, as when noting the “green flecks glinting in the firelight” in someone’s eyes and a setting sun’s “streamers of yellow and orange to accent the darkening sky.” With the exception of one significant death’s relatively minor impact, the ending is satisfying and sets the stage for the final book in a prospective trilogy.
Resolute women energize a remarkable, ongoing coming-of-age story.Pub Date: June 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798992769005
Page Count: 364
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 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
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
© 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.
