A well-researched historical tale that illuminates and transcends Argentinian politics.
An Argentinian journalist pursues what may be the story of a lifetime in Sanderson’s novel.
On a chilly night in Buenos Aires in 1956, a man hands an infant girl over to a young nun at an orphanage. Fifty-two years later, in 2006, journalist Andrés Carriego, an outspoken critic of the corrupt Peronist movement, makes a living writing under the pen name Funes—a reference to a story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who makes a cameo later on. Carriego is in possession of 30 years’ worth of writings by a mysterious woman who claims to be the daughter of politician Juan Perón and a 13-year-old girl named Nélida Haydeé Rivas. Days after Perón's reburial in San Vincente sparked bloody protests, Carriego received a journal from a woman who was killed in the violence. In a note, she identifies herself as Dolores Perón Rivas and asks Carriego to share her story. Through Dolores’ journal, Sanderson describes, in intricate detail, the orderly but loveless convent from which she escaped at 15, the cigarette smoke and raised voices of her bohemian apartment, and the wretchedness of a jail cell. Dolores is also shown to be a victim of assault and other atrocities committed during a 1976 military dictatorship. Sanderson, a Fulbright scholar who’s published extensive work on Latin America, challenges readers to solve the story’s mysteries, perhaps knowing that historical questions become boring the moment they’re answered. Along the way, he manages to spin an almost mystical tale, full of visions, sacrifice, and wandering, out of Perón and Rivas’ story. Alongside the political tumult and bloodshed, he effectively explores themes involving motherhood and sexist attitudes toward women. Nuns repeatedly tell Delores that her mother was a “whore,” for example, but she still wants desperately to meet her; this longing manifests in fixations on maternal figures, which bleed into attraction in the case of Sister Fabula, the only kind nun at the convent, and Blanca, a university student. It all leads to a devastating, inevitable confrontation between Dolores and Rivas in the book’s second half.
A well-researched historical tale that illuminates and transcends Argentinian politics.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-914913-01-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: The Conrad Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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
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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