An immersive novel of the American Indian Wars.
Farmer chronicles the life and career of an Apache renegade in this historical Western novel, the first in a series.
Arizona, 1871: When Ohyessonna is 11 years old, many of the women and children of his tribe are massacred in their home camp by a raiding party of Tohono O’odham, Mexican, and American vigilantes. Ohyessonna and his family, who were out gathering food in the hills, survive the slaughter and retreat with the remaining tribe members into the mountains, from where they launch a series of revenge raids against the White Eyes (whites) in the area. Ohyessonna learns to shoot arrows and guard horses, and by the time he’s 14, he’s a crack shot with a Winchester. One day, a Blue Coat rides into camp looking for a good shot to help him with his work on the San Carlos Reservation. “This is a man I should study,” thinks Ohyessonna. “He can teach me much about White Eyes and how they do things, things I need to know and understand.” Under the tutelage of Teniente Beauford, and later U.S. Army Chief of Scouts Al Sieber, Ohyessonna learns the ways of the White Eyes—but when his people come under the oppression of the same Blue Coats he’s sworn to serve, he chooses the former. Under the new name of the Apache Kid, the outlaw Ohyessonna ranges across the Southwest, attempting to elude a death sentence for himself and his tribe’s way of life. Narrated from Ohyessonna’s perspective, Farmer’s story adopts the Apache’s sense of geography, history, and time, as well as his plainspoken diction: “Though scarred in his face, an eye sagging in the scar from his fight with a bear in his young-man days, but its vision still good, Loco was no man’s fool.” The book covers a fascinating period of history, and Ohyessonna embodies its painful contradictions. Nevertheless, one wishes Farmer offered more of a sense of his protagonist’s interiority, which may have helped to balance out the novel’s strenuous pace.
An immersive novel of the American Indian Wars.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798892990264
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Hat Creek
Review Posted Online: April 18, 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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