A complex whodunit that also provides a fascinating immersion in a bygone era.
The only female lawyer in colonial Bombay again turns sleuth to aid a hapless servant.
Before presenting a party on June 1, 1922, that celebrates wealthy Uma Bhatia’s founding of a charity hospital, Massey reveals the lamentations of Oshadi, the elderly housemistress of the Bhatia domestic staff, over the constant friction between Uma and her sister, Mangala. At the party, attorney Perveen Mistry meets India’s only female obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr. Miriam Penkar, but the celebratory mood is marred when the clothing of Uma’s young son, Ishan, catches fire. Sunanda, a young servant who rushes to dowse him, is scolded by Mangala, who says she should have been watching the boy. Perveen notices that Sunanda herself has been badly burned. A few days later, while collecting a bail refund, Perveen is shocked to see that Sunanda is now under arrest. Her alleged crime is taking “an oral abortifacient,” abetted by Oshadi. Sunanda’s pleas of innocence prompt Perveen to step up immediately to represent her. She naturally enlists the help of her new friend Miriam. Sunanda’s situation has clear resonance a century later. This complex case is just the tip of an iceberg whose corruption is progressively revealed by Perveen’s investigation. As tradition dictates, Perveen lives with her parents; a buoyant subplot follows the family’s adventure with the arrival of new baby Khushy, daughter of Perveen’s brother. While anchoring her novel in a mystery, Massey offers a striking depiction of India in the 1920s, complete with maps, detailed descriptions of the customs of the time, and a panoramic cast of characters from every social stratum.
A complex whodunit that also provides a fascinating immersion in a bygone era.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781641293297
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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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