Serious-minded yet eminently readable historical fiction handily done.
Based on real events, this novel offers a sweeping view of politics in rural Ireland in the turbulent 1870s, focusing specifically on activist Michael Davitt and his role in the class struggle known as the Land War.
Michael Davitt has just been released from seven and a half years at Dartmoor prison, paroled from his 15-year term for felony treason against the British Crown. Although quiet and cautious from his years of solitary confinement, he is by no means chastened; straightaway he resumes his role as an agitator for chipping away at “landlordism,” the vestigial feudal system that persists in Ireland. Potato crops are failing, rents are rising, and the starving poor are being turned out of their homes just as they were during the famine of the 1840s. Davitt, everyone agrees, has the visibility and passion to help right these wrongs. Keady (The Dowry, 2006) enlivens his story with a cast of memorable characters: Mary Duddy, the housewife evicted from her land; Father O’Malley, the parish priest who must balance his love of country and commitment to the poor with his sworn allegiance to Rome; Lord Lucan, the malevolent aristocrat known as the “Old Exterminator,” and his unctuous Scottish land agent, MacAlister; Bicko, the ambivalent spy; and visionary parliamentarian Charles Stewart Parnell. The extent to which characters other than Davitt and Parnell are based on real people isn’t exactly clear, but either way, the author has laudably made them believable and engaging. Readers will find themselves fretting over what will become of Mary Duddy and her family, mentally hissing whenever MacAlister appears on the pages and rooting for Davitt to win in politics as well as love. Dealing with material that might easily become either ponderous or strident, Keady writes liltingly, with dialogue that rings true whether it’s the vernacular of Irish farmers or the measured politesse of the duchess of Marlborough. The book ends with some successes, some lingering complications and less than a third of Davitt’s life story told—a tantalizing hint, perhaps, of a sequel or two in the works.
Serious-minded yet eminently readable historical fiction handily done.Pub Date: May 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4751-9082-3
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Castletree Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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