A richly atmospheric tale about two very different women seeking their ideal loves.
In this historical novel, a woman in the late 19th century chooses between two possible lovers.
At the center of Alexander’s story is Caroline Corbett, part of a wealthy South Carolina family in 1899, who decides to seek a job at a sewing factory in order to become a modern working woman. Her friend Anne Brighton is enamored of factory boss Mr. Sanders, whose wife died of tuberculosis (and who strikes Caroline as an unlikely romantic hero). Caroline’s own love interests are at first split between courtly Dr. Stephen Connor and humble but attractive sharecropper Clayton Bell. Unfortunately for Caroline, Clayton’s cousin Jessie Bell considers him the love of her life. As the tale progresses, readers watch the parallel tracks of Caroline’s romances and Jessie’s obsessions. The main confusion in these pages is that the novel’s subtitle is belied by its cast of characters. Although a good deal of space is devoted to smart, saintly Caroline, it is devious, “kinda cracked” Jessie who dominates this series opener thoroughly. Her fixations and villainies, culminating in the book’s climactic, tragic scene, make for far more compelling reading than any of the details of Caroline’s pallid courtship with Connor. When the tale eventually gets around to the line “Caroline wondered at her own descent into the eternal land of carnal desire,” many readers will be thinking that the descent is mighty leisurely. “Most girls pass through their crushes and move on,” the narrative tells readers, “but Jessie was far from ordinary—her intensity funneled every effort into purposeful direction.” That passion is magnetic right to the end of the story. Alexander does a good job of fleshing out all of the other major characters, but the novel belongs to dangerous, deadly Jessie.
A richly atmospheric tale about two very different women seeking their ideal loves.Pub Date: June 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-955444-00-2
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Onalex Books
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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