Vesce’s larger-than-life portrait of Hopkins reminds that there really is some truth to the whole “Greatest Generation”...
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's largely unheralded adviser, Harry Hopkins, is the subject of Vesce’s historical novel.
Harry Hopkins was an Iowan with an unpretentious background who raised himself to impressive political heights on FDR’s coattails. After graduating in 1912 from Iowa’s Grinnell College he moves to New York, runs a couple of social programs where his talents as an administrator come to the attention of the new Roosevelt administration, which needs to get things done, pronto. And in Vesce’s novel, we learn exactly how efficient Hopkins was: first at the Works Progress Administration, doling out dollars in fulfilling an agenda that earns him lavish praise and deep enmity (many forget how deeply unpopular FDR’s initiatives were in some quarters). Moving into World War II, Roosevelt puts Hopkins in charge of the Lend Lease program and, more important, relies on Harry’s help in almost every decision. (Hopkins and his family actually lived in the White House for several crucial years, with Harry and FDR often hashing out policy in their pajamas.) There’s a memorable scene here where Churchill is insulted when this “nobody” shows up in FDR’s stead but quickly realizes that Hopkins is immensely capable. Hopkins, as we learn, is also one of the few politicians that Stalin trusts (for what that’s worth). In the author’s hands, Hopkins comes off a fixer in the best sense (“Leave it with me,” he says whenever the next crisis arises). But Vesce’s novel also deftly describes how Hopkins’ body betrays him at the prime of life in the form of stomach cancer: The doctors at Mayo remove three quarters of his stomach, saving his life but leaving him technically starving for the last 10 years of his life. The end comes in January of 1946, as Hopkins is totally worn out at 55 after a life well lived in service of his country.
This first question one might ask is: Why a novel about Hopkins? There are plenty of factual accounts, biographies, written about this historically underrated figure. Vesce is not a great writer but he is obviously inspired by Hopkins’ life story and in turn manages to pique reader interest through his passionate dedication to historical detail. We get the nitty-gritty details of high-level talks involving big egos, bitter disappointments, and giddy hopes. There are some dramatic scenes where political bigwigs clash and Harry has to intervene like a den mother—or perhaps like a Dutch uncle. On the other hand, Vesce admits to taking liberties—after all this is historical fiction—but this novel is rife with unexpected historical cameos and obscure events that make one wonder how much of this is based on fact. A straight history would clarify such uncertainty, but at what cost? What stories cry out for fictional treatment and what others should safely hug the shores of history? Shakespeare, after all, routinely turned historical fact into deathless drama. Vesce is obviously no Shakespeare, but he knows how to spin a good historical yarn.
Vesce’s larger-than-life portrait of Hopkins reminds that there really is some truth to the whole “Greatest Generation” mythos.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798999645319
Page Count: 620
Publisher: Verlibri Media LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 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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