A breezy read about a skilled and prolific musician that mostly hits the right notes.
A novel about the life and work of real-life Hollywood film composer Harry Warren.
Raymond, author of Grace Notes: A Novel Based on the Life of Henry Mancini (2018), here focuses on another musician of the silver screen: Warren, the first songwriter to win three Academy Awards. His impressive catalog of more than 400 tunes includes such standards as “At Last,” “42nd Street,” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” and in the pages of this novel, he hobnobs with such luminaries as George and Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, and James Cagney. In real life, Warren was a notably private person, so there’s not a lot of existing material about him on which to base a biography, so Raymond supplements his work with fictionalized material. It works, for the most part, although there are moments that don’t ring as true as others; the author’s re-created and wholly invented conversations lead to some hokey dialogue, such as during a discussion among members of the protagonist’s family to change their surname, Guaragna, to Warren. Later, readers are melodramatically told that the first moment that Warren, who was known as Tuti as a child, played an organ, “a ray of light beamed through the stained glass, splashing Tuti in a rainbow of color.” Raymond clearly took liberties with this scene, but some others aren’t as clear-cut. Did a teenage Harry have a chance encounter with silent film star Norma Talmadge? Did Harry learn his true fate from a fortuneteller? One can’t be sure, as no citations are provided. Readers can only hope that scenes like the one in which Warren, lyricist Al Dubin, and choreographer Busby Berkeley put together the song “We’re in the Money” are at least close to the truth. Still, the mix of fact and fiction generally functions well, and Raymond manages to shine a light on a Hollywood great who may be unfamiliar to many.
A breezy read about a skilled and prolific musician that mostly hits the right notes.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947431-43-0
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Mentoris Project
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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