A wonkish but rousing fantasia.
A female airship pilot battles an evil industrialist, a Prussian militarist, and a sexist society in this debut steampunk adventure.
In 1896, after Heinz Amstel, a German engineer and businessman in Joplin, Missouri, turns up dead—electrocuted and torn apart by coyotes—his widow, Evaline, known as “Evvy,” is left with a mountain of debt; custody of young Bettina, Heinz’s daughter by another woman; and the bankrupt remnants of Heinz’s airship company, which offers paying customers the best airborne experience that money can buy. She duly learns to fly the dirigibles herself, and she becomes famous when she pilots a group of Baptists and a newspaperman through a tornado to a safe landing. Unfortunately, Evvy is shadowed by minions of Prussian Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who claims that his stolen designs were the basis for the superairship that Heinz was secretly building, The Empress of the Clouds. She’s also stalked by Georgia tycoon Erasmus Marchand, who’s planning to fit Empress with a death ray and overthrow the government by zapping President William McKinley’s inauguration from the sky; his new regime, he says, will simultaneously reinstitute slavery and establish a Jewish national homeland in the United States. Evvy’s quest to thwart the various plots, assisted by chivalrous deputy Sean McTavish, leads her into ever more dangerous scrapes, all heading toward a rare dirigible dogfight. Ultican’s period fantasy is all about the newfangled gear. Evvy is a STEM-focused heroine who’s endlessly inquisitive about horseless carriages, electric dynamos, fluorescent goggles, and other marvels, forever flummoxing patronizing men with her knowledge and skill. The narrative sometimes drifts like a giant balloon, and the characters’ schemes and motivations aren’t always plausible. But Ultican’s straightforward prose makes the science and engineering interesting and the action scenes gripping: “The girders twisted and snapped, emitting unearthly high-pitched tones as heavy bolts and metal beams hurtled through the atmosphere, scattering the terrified onlookers who now desperately sought to escape.” Readers who love derring-do with charismatic, old-school technology will find this a diverting read.
A wonkish but rousing fantasia.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-65525-866-4
Page Count: 365
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.
The true story of Axis diplomats detained in the U.S. at the start of World War II is transformed into a dazzling historical novel set at a sumptuous West Virginia hotel.
Bestselling YA fantasy author Stiefvater’s adult debut introduces a writer whose prodigious imagination and distinctive prose style have combined to create a novel that will remind readers of why they fell in love with reading in the first place. At its center is the captivating June Hudson, an erstwhile Appalachian orphan who was taken in by the wealthy Gilfoyle family, owners of the Avallon Hotel & Spa, a high-society retreat built over underground mineral springs. At his death, the patriarch bequeathed ownership to his playboy son, Edgar, but made June the general manager, as she had spent her life learning the business—and also shared with Gilfoyle Sr. a rare gift relating to the “sweetwater” springs, a fantastical element of this otherwise realistic novel. Aside from the magical waters and a few other fanciful details, Stiefvater’s fictional world is based on extensive research into high-end hotels of the period, creating a version of luxury so appealing that readers will wish they could check into the Avallon and stay on indefinitely. In fact, the novel revolves around the true meaning of luxury. To June, it has nothing to do with wealth; it is more connected to joy, and to the book’s title: “June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury.” Also brilliantly managed is the rest of the ensemble cast: sexy FBI agents; June’s inimitable staff; the delegations of Japanese, Germans, and Italians detained at the hotel, some quite nasty, but among them a strange, special, totally silent child. And on top of all this, a delicious love story!
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593655504
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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