A well-crafted family tale that will enthrall readers interested in the early 20th century.
A biographical novel combines a family history and an immense tapestry of oral histories, focusing on a beloved grandmother.
In Chicago in November 1885, Maggie Keville meets Moses Flanagan in a streetcar on the way to work. Both are Irish immigrants in the American Midwest with hopes of a better future pinned on them by the families they left behind. Maggie and Moses are the parents of the main character, Kitty Flanagan, Barrett Price’s grandmother. Kitty’s beginnings are beautifully told in Maggie and Moses’ love story before the protagonist takes center stage. Kitty is born in 1890 and lives through an era of great change: the turn of the 20th century, World War I, and the Depression. The period details in the novel are elaborate (“Sunday is unseasonably warm. Kitty decides to wear her plaid taffeta skirt with a frilly shirtwaist, a fitted bodice, and her high-top shoes with the medium heel. Her stylish felt chapeau sports a hatband with a couple of long pheasant feathers”). But the author never loses the narrative flair that comes with the convincing dialogue and characterizations she has imagined and woven together. It is a sweeping story covering a half century that has, at its core, a search for stability and a woman who desires nothing more than to keep her family safe and together. Perhaps most poignant is Kitty’s relationship with her younger brother, Modie, who falls in with the wrong crowd, shedding a light on the criminal culture of early-20th-century Chicago and St. Louis. The tale is peppered with loss and heartbreak, but it also shines with joy and humor at times as well as spotlighting the lot of women in that era: in particular, issues surrounding reproductive health and abortion. Despite her strong connection to the main character, Barrett Price seldom slips into sentimentality. In the author’s engaging story, Kitty is indisputably a three-dimensional hero, with both strengths and flaws that make her thoroughly realistic.
A well-crafted family tale that will enthrall readers interested in the early 20th century.Pub Date: July 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9841292-6-3
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Mad in Pursuit
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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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