The Spanish Inquisition, forbidden queer love, and a murder to be solved—add to your must-read pile.
Van de Graaff presents a historical novel about the Spanish Inquisition, religious freedom, art, and the lengths people will go to for those they love.
In the 1500s, during the Spanish Inquisition, Francisca Mendez is raised in Seville, Spain, by her uncle, Carlos, an archbishop, while she cares for her bedridden mother, Raquel. As a child, her mother teaches her to paint, a practice she continues into adulthood as she learns techniques from her mentor, Antonio Ceretti, and her friend Elizabeth, another painter who apprenticed with Leonardo da Vinci. While her uncle is away on a trip, Francisca discovers her mother’s last unfinished fresco painting, with limewash smeared over it. She decides to restore her mother’s work before her uncle returns, uncovering startling truths that upset her uncle’s mentor, Father Alberto, and lead to a series of discoveries about her mysterious past. As Francisca paints, she meets Isabel de Flores, Ceretti’s wife and the most beautiful woman Francisca has ever encountered. Feeling an instant attraction, the two women become close, and together they work to right the wrongs of both the past and present. As they uncover secrets about Francisca’s father’s death, they realize more is at stake; they are in grave danger—the Inquisition is upon them, and Francisca doesn’t know that Isabel has her own goals involving a group that could bring the fight right to her front door. Caught between her deepening love for Isabel and her desire to enact justice for her father, Francisca must choose between continuing the life she has always enjoyed or jumping headfirst into the unknown.
Excitement builds from the start in this engaging, suspenseful, and fast-paced novel, especially when Francisca finds herself “wondering if she had discovered something more prized than freedom,” a foreshadowing that there’s more here than meets the eye. As the story continues and Francisca discovers more about her sexuality, a gripping sense of anticipation drives the plot; the reader yearns for her and Isabel to become intimate while knowing this was a time when love between two women was forbidden. The juxtapositions of the Inquisition, Francisca’s family’s involvement in high levels of the church, and Isabel’s marriage to Antonio effectively establish feelings of both hope and dread regarding the lovers’ fates. The majority of the characters are well developed—Father Alberto’s character creates consistent conflict and will have readers wondering whether he’s a truly righteous church leader or one who harbors evil desires. Some structural faults remain: Bernardo, Francisca’s best friend from childhood, ultimately proves important to the plot, and having some hints sprinkled throughout the narrative about his political involvements would have been helpful. (While readers learn about him in short snippets, it’s only in the context of his friendship with Francisca.) Overall, though, the engaging prose, compelling characters, and suspenseful plot make for a truly enjoyable read.
The Spanish Inquisition, forbidden queer love, and a murder to be solved—add to your must-read pile.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781763699809
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Alaya Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2025
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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