An appropriate and high-stakes conclusion to a Civil War saga.
Lt. James Harper and his men are thrown into one of the bloodiest battles in the American Civil War in this, the final volume in Gabhann’s trilogy of historical novels.
Lt. Harper has finally rejoined his First Iowa Volunteers, along with Corp. Gustav Magnusson and nurse (and erstwhile prostitute) Katie Malloy. His new assignment—assistant quartermaster—is once again unbecoming to the highly experienced former deputy federal marshal, prison escapee, and spy for Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. It’s campaign season, and the Union Army has pushed deep into Tennessee. After a surprise promotion to captain—which seems to displease most of the men in his battalion—Harper is placed in an administrative position that he hopes, as ever, to parlay into a battle command. Luckily for him, the proximity of the enemy means he doesn’t have to wait long. Magnusson is in a wheelchair after injuries he sustained helping Katie flee her brothel, which prevents him from riding with his skirmishers. He’s beginning to wonder whether rescuing Katie was worth all the trouble. Katie is glad to be free but still terrified of reprisal from her old colleagues. As Harper and Magnusson chafe against their new roles, the inevitable conflict with the nearby Rebel soldiers—who have already drawn Union blood—looms on the horizon, threatening to shatter whatever temporary safety they have found. Gabhann writes with his typical blend of blood, grit, and wry humor: “Silence filled the tent punctuated by the rumble of the distant canons. It was times like these that war seemed surreal to Harper—how the movements and assaults of thousands of men could be understood and planned by three men hunched over a map.” The author writes well about battle, and the novel plays to that strength. Furthermore, the final storylines for Harper and his companions provide the necessary emotional context for the conflict, as well as supplying satisfying conclusions to their character arcs. While the pacing occasionally bogs down, particularly in the book’s first half, this is the strongest novel in the trilogy.
An appropriate and high-stakes conclusion to a Civil War saga.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-7343974-4-4
Page Count: 383
Publisher: Natchez Trail Press
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2020
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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