Well-intentioned but overly familiar.
This collaboration by longtime friends Edwards and Richman draws on the authors’ Black and Jewish family histories to build an expressly uplifting Civil War fiction.
The novel begins in 1863 New Orleans, showcasing the forbidden but abiding love between musically gifted William, a classically trained flutist who’s enslaved, and Stella, who lives technically free as the kept woman of William’s current owner. With Stella’s aid, William escapes to join the Union Army as a member of the Louisiana Native Guard. Meanwhile, in New York, trombonist and composer Jacob has been inspired by his wife, Lily, a suffragette and abolitionist, to join the Union forces on moral grounds. The novel balances three intertwining narratives: Pregnant with a child who could be William’s or his master’s, Stella struggles to survive in Union-controlled New Orleans, where food is scarce and Confederate insurrection a constant threat; William and Jacob experience wartime atrocities while their unlikely friendship deepens through their music connection; and in New York, Lily devotes herself to the Union cause with genteel moral certainty until she ventures South in search of Jacob and faces her naïveté about the war’s cost. Given that African Americans in the South had everything to gain or lose in this war, it is no surprise that Stella’s and William’s segments are the most compelling; the writing about New Orleans also creates a sensual, specific sense of place missing elsewhere. Lily reads like a mouthpiece for enlightened concepts, even in her love letters. There is no romantic chemistry between her and Jacob, who remains an undeveloped cipher. What should be an interesting twist, his discomfort as a Jewish outsider in the Union ranks, barely resonates, while his bonding with William comes too easily. All four protagonists are more noble symbols than characters, and key plot points—including Stella’s stitched maps and Jacob’s estrangement from his Confederate brother—border on Civil War story clichés.
Well-intentioned but overly familiar.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-525-89978-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Graydon House
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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