A thoughtful tale that rings with the harsh beauty of a howling wind.
Carlson’s historical novel offers an ethereal journey through faith, wilderness, and the human spirit in 19th-century Eastern Europe.
In 1860, a young RussianOrthodox monk named Arkad Afanasyev embarks on a perilous trek from the safety and asceticism of his mainland monastery to study under the mysterious and ascetic Father Vasily on the island of Spitsbergen. He must embark on the dangerous voyage with the pagan Pomors, who make regular trips to the snowbound island to hunt seals and bears for pelts and whale for blubber. The Pomors loosely believe in the church’s teachings but tell many tales of the spirits and guardian animals who protect the balance of the island and harshly punish men who disturb it. Arkady is initially disgusted by the men, whose lifestyles and values are so different from his own, but being in such a harsh place in close proximity to others is bound to inspire empathy. The monk reluctantly learns to live with these rough and raucous men, who are as likely to embrace one another as they are to get into fights. Along the way, Arkady is beset by dangers—including cold, starvation, and bears—and begins to feel God more deeply in his heart: “If this should be my end, so be it….In good faith, I came here. You would not still my heart so soon…you wouldn’t. I must reach my teacher, Father Vasily.” Carlson has crafted a novel that perfectly captures both the romanticism and inescapable pull of the past, as well as the setting’s incalculable strangeness to modern readers. The island of Spitsbergen is both alien and enchanting, and Carlson’s characters are beautifully rendered, drawing readers in as they seek to know them more deeply. The author effectively shows how his protagonist learns as much from his surroundings as he does from his teacher, and how the worlds of Christianity and paganism whirl through the young monk’s soul.
A thoughtful tale that rings with the harsh beauty of a howling wind.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781946580658
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Alternating Current Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
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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