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
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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