A sensitive and searing story of confronting evil at home and abroad.
Holmes’ historical novel explores Black GIs’ struggles in World War II.
In Holmes’ gripping wartime tale, the oppressions of bigotry exact a fearful psychic toll on American soldiers of color and on a young Polish boy in a concentration camp. The story focuses on siblings Sammie and Amos Johnson, who enlist for different reasons. For Amos, the conflict offers a way of burnishing his leadership skills, which have often been stifled by “often incompetent White foremen” at his steel mill job. For Sammie, joining the 761st Tank Battalion promises an “adventure” that will bring him face to face with the horrors of Nazi concentration camps—a story thread that’s vividly explored through the tale of David Cohen, an 11-year-old Jewish boy trapped in Poland’s Bialystok ghetto. After a futile uprising against the ghetto’s Nazi enforcers, David endures a series of increasingly hellish camp confinements that force him to numb all emotions in order to survive: “The last time he remembered weeping was when the Gestapo had led his father away.” This emotional strategy comes naturally to Black soldier Lonnie West of the 761st—a gay man who’s subjected to endless cruelties. He dreams of becoming a teacher, so students will accept differences “without identifying what differences I’m talking about,” he tells Sammie in one of the novel’s most moving scenes. “If I can do that, that’ll be a start.” What emerges is a plea for tolerance that strikes an impressive contrast with the evils the characters experience on the front lines. Overall, Holmes has done a yeoman’s job of weaving all of these themes into a truly engaging, richly crafted narrative, maintaining a high standard for modern war fiction.
A sensitive and searing story of confronting evil at home and abroad.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798897470686
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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