A barnburner of a novel featuring some truly unforgettable characters.
In 19th-century gold rush Georgia, young Barker McRae finds herself in possession of a land deed that stokes family greed in this historical novel by Pelletier.
It’s the early 1830s, and gold has been discovered in Georgia. The state holds a lottery—40 acres of prime prospecting land for lucky winners. (The fact that most of that land is owned by the Cherokee is a cloudy quibble.) Barker McRae is awarded one of those deeds, but her evil uncle, Wiley Wood, demands to have it. So she takes off with the deed, throwing her lot in with Matthew Higgenbotham, the deed deliverer who set all this in motion. But we soon find out what Barker is really after: her father, Lorenzo McRae, a God-maddened circuit rider who abandoned her when she was 12. Wiley happens to be a captain of the county militia, so he and an impromptu posse are in hot pursuit of Barker and Higgenbotham—not to mention that valuable deed. Our daring duo endure one crisis after another, all culminating in a final, heart-stopping climax—involving Barker, Higgenbotham, Lorenzo, and Wiley and his men—at the spectacular Tallulah Gorge. Pelletier is an experienced writer, and it shows in every line. (“And the wolfdog bears within himself the same agonized dissent as this assaulted land, the same throttled bewilderment.”) That “wolfdog” is a stray who decides that guarding Barker is his life’s mission. This novel has a lot to say about the historical situation of pre–Civil War Georgia. There really was a Georgia gold rush, long before the more famous ones in California and Montana, and there really was an illegal lottery. Two characters bear special mention. One is the truly diabolical but complex and conflicted Wiley Wood, a sexual abuser who convinces himself in a twisted way that he loves his niece. The other is reluctant hero Matthew Higgenbotham. All he wanted to do was shake the red Georgia clay off his boots for good and go home to Vermont. Instead, he becomes Barker’s surrogate father, whether either of them likes it or not.
A barnburner of a novel featuring some truly unforgettable characters.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780881469721
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mercer Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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