A superbly written story of love, betrayal, and resistance in the face of crisis.
Southard offers a historical novel about the real-life Beecher-Tilton sex scandal, told from the perspective of the woman at its center.
The novel opens with Elizabeth Tilton on her deathbed in Brooklyn, New York, in 1897,reflecting on the defining moments of her life that still haunt her. In her infirmity, she struggles to recognize some of her children; she has no friends she can count on, as the choices she has made have turned her into a social pariah. In this state, she slips between the present and memories from about 30 years earlier. At the time, her husband, Theodore, was a prominent New York newspaper publisher and journalist who championed the rights of enslaved people and women and the doctrine of “free love.” Elizabeth was deeply involved in progressive reform and active in the liberal Plymouth Church, led by the renowned Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Theodore and Elizabeth’s marriage was happy and collaborative; however, the death of their infant son, Paul, devastated them both. When Theodore confessed to a past affair, Elizabeth turned to Beecher for emotional comfort, which led to physical intimacy. Theodore, suspecting the liaison, began to publicly accuse Beecher of seducing his wife, throwing Elizabeth, Beecher, and himself into a scandal that stretched on for years, pushing them all to the brink of ruin. Over the course of this novel based on true events, Southard’s prose is gripping (“The glass feels icy cold to my fingers. Dry leaves are still swirling in the wind. Tears run down my cheeks, leaving droplets on the windowsill”), and the story is suitably elegiac, calling to mind many touchstonehistorical romances. The characters are well-defined and memorable, and include such prominent historical figures as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Readers will find themselves engrossed in the drama while also learning about a peripheral but compelling piece of American history.
A superbly written story of love, betrayal, and resistance in the face of crisis.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781647428303
Page Count: 336
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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