The continuing adventures of the Lawtons and their circle, hampered by uneven execution.
Half a dozen romances and other wild adventures enliven Weatherford’s historical sequel.
This follow-up to Blessings from the Four Winds (2021) takes up where that novel left off in 1887, as guests depart and servants clean up after Will Lawton and Niabi’s wedding at Applegate Ranch in Covington, Tennessee; a brief introduction helpfully provides snapshots of the main characters and locations from the previous novel. This sequel follows the newlyweds as they plan to start a family and build a homestead on land near Niabi’s tribal village, where the U.S. government is expected to open parts of what should be Native American territory to settlement by others. It also intertwines the romantic adventures of several other passionate couples: Lorraine Applegate is with Capt. Horton, despite their 10-year age difference; Sam Egglesby Jr. nearly derails his courtship of nursing student Rita Walker; Louisa Ortega is engaged to a handsome, wealthy bachelor, despite her yearning for Nashoba, and Nashoba despairs when he believes he’s lost her. In the meantime, while Mr. Hastings returns to his Texas ranch, Mrs. Hastings decides to travel to New York City; there, her beloved former chef, Oscar, and his grandfather Phillipe have promised to find a new cook for her, and she unexpectedly gains her heart’s desire. In Weatherford’s previous series entry, was Will’s adventurous travels that brought the various characters together—and to his wedding—but in the sequel, their stories diverge, and they feel more like related short stories than a cohesive novel. Although violence does occur, the difficulties that characters face are more often romantic misunderstandings; there are many interludes of passionate kissing, caressing, and lovemaking. Some of the writing is awkward, with abrupt transitions and odd choices, such as the inclusion of nearly two pages on Will’s memory of tasting his first banana, which he connects to his wife: “Every night I can look forward to peeling off the outer coverings of my most precious sweetness.” Nevertheless, readers who enjoyed the first installment of Will and Niabi’s story will undoubtedly enjoy this one.
The continuing adventures of the Lawtons and their circle, hampered by uneven execution.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798218645328
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Lucky Valley Press
Review Posted Online: July 17, 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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