A fast-paced, engrossing, and character-driven war tale for history buffs.
The brutalities of the first year of the Civil War take center stage in this first installment of a historical fiction series.
On Nov. 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln is elected president, and Halbert Paine, a lawyer in Milwaukee, soon finds himself drinking a dusty, old bottle of champagne to celebrate. In Virginia, James Hanger hears the news while in a college class; conversations immediately turn to the Secession of the Southern states. Hanger is eager to fight for the Confederate cause, but he gets seriously wounded during a battle, resulting in his leg being amputated. The doctor tells him: “There was artillery fire and a six-pound cannonball bounced inside the building where you, unfortunately, were standing and hit you above the knee.” Although Paine is more pragmatic, he makes good on his promise to fight for his belief that neither the North nor the South “can prosper or thrive without the other” when states begin to secede. What follows is a swiftly paced story aiming to show the difficulties of the Civil War for both sides that does not shy away from the issue of slavery and its centrality to the conflict. Paine and Hanger, two real-life figures whom Traner has reimagined in this novel, are on separate paths throughout. While this element makes the tale occasionally feel disjointed, it deftly illuminates historical events in fictional ways. Hanger’s side of the story, which has him slowly reexamining the institution of slavery and exploring the creation of prosthetic limbs, is perhaps more compelling than Paine’s. The warrior’s journey, which involves his acceptance of his own medical needs and his determination to help others, delivers some of the most poignant parts of the tale. Yet Paine’s experiences, as researched and presented by the author, make for captivating reading in dissecting the nuances of the North and South divide as well as spotlighting the worries of families through the lawyer’s letters to his wife, Mary. Traner succeeds in providing a complex, human angle on the Civil War, which will surely have readers clamoring for the second installment of this trilogy.
A fast-paced, engrossing, and character-driven war tale for history buffs.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 309
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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