A heartfelt, if mildly excessive, historical tale about a man with an immortal spirit.
A supernaturally tinged novel of love and longing, set in Civil War–era Louisiana.
De Abreu’s historical tale opens in the beleaguered city of New Orleans in 1862 as it faces the imminent threat of siege and destruction at the hands of Union forces commanded by Commodore David Farragut. To this war-torn place has recently come a young woman named Nabella,who meets and befriends rooming-house owner Eulalie DeMasiliere. The two become close and do their best to comfort each other as each day’s newspapers (reproduced among the novel’s many illustrations) offer grim information. However, they’re intermittently intrigued by their enigmatic neighbor, cabman Valsin Chiasson, who always seems “interested and bored at the same time.” Nabella eagerly awaits the return of the man she considers to be her future husband, Jean Trahan, from the front lines, and as she waits, she must live through Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s infamous General Order No. 28, which decrees that any New Orleans woman insulting a Union officer can be treated as harshly as a criminal. These experiences are counterbalanced with the deepening story of Valsin, his love for a woman named Marie Louise Gaspard, and most remarkably, the supernatural mystery of his life: the fact that he’s destined to be reincarnated over and over and only dimly recall his previous existences. “Although Valentin had what some may call an average life,” readers are told, “it was as deep as the sea.” The narrative gradually inches forward in time to the present and then the future, with echoes of Valentin at its heart.
One of the signature strengths of de Abreu’s novel is its elaborately detailed evocation of late-19th-century New Orleans at the time of the Civil War—one that’s considerably aided by the author’s decision to illustrate her novel; on almost every page, there are black-and-white photos of old New Orleans locations, facsimiles of period newspapers, and contemporary prints and portraits. The prose can occasionally become labored, as in a detailed description of Nabella’s clothing, which notes her “wine-colored gown gathered and crossed at the bust,” “a garnet choker necklace and earrings she inherited from her mother,” and a “beautiful cream shawl embroidered in multicolored flowers [that] wrapped around her elbows and hung low in back.” Although the author’s storytelling conviction is undeniable, there’s a didactic tenor to the book that is particularly pronounced in the book’s final section, which features questions and reading prompts. They’re clearly intended to provoke book club discussions, but they have the parallel effect of drawing attention to the fact that the story of Nabella and the long, strange saga of Valsin aren’t substantial enough to warrant such back-of-the-textbook analysis. That said, the differences between those two narrative strains—one being standard historical fiction fare, and the other adding fantasy elements in the style of the work of Anne Rice—create an intriguing dynamic that de Abreu handles with some skill, which is helped by her extensive research.
A heartfelt, if mildly excessive, historical tale about a man with an immortal spirit.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Jmfdea Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2022
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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