A pleasantly engaging read for historical fiction fans.
Bernard’s novel chronicles the life of Mary Elizabeth Frederica Mackenzie, the high-spirited daughter of Lord Seaforth, chieftain of the Highlands clan Mackenzie.
By June of 1803, 20-year-old Mary Mackenzie has had her fill of the island of Barbados. She and her family have been there for two years, ever since her father was appointed colonial governor of the island, the Crown’s Caribbean center of trade. (Barbados’ wealth is derived from its prodigious production of sugar cane, farmed by African slaves.) It is on the island where Mary first confronts the cruelty with which the British colonists treat their slaves. To her dismay, she discovers that even her beloved father, beset by gambling debts and in need of an income-producing investment, has purchased a plantation and 200 slaves. She longs to return to her life in the Highlands and London. Fortunately, she meets and falls in love with someone who can grant that wish: the esteemed Sir Samuel Hood, a commodore in the Royal Navy. After their nuptials, Mary and Samuel set sail for England, establishing residence in Samuel’s elegant London townhouse. Yet a shadow hangs over the couple’s happiness in the form of a 100-year-old frightening prediction from legendary Highlands seer Coinneach Odhar. A free thinker with little regard for religion, Mary has steadfastly refused to give credence to the legendary prophecy of doom (“I did not believe in the curse. I refused to”). But as she suffers one personal tragedy after another, Mary begins to question her skepticism. This second novel in Bernard’s Historic Women of the Highlands series is rooted in historical sources (including the letters and diary of the real Mary Mackenzie) and brought to vivid life by the author’s imaginative and well-paced prose. The poignant, highly dramatic family saga paints a detailed period portrait of the era’s luxurious upper-class British lifestyle and is nicely peppered with appearances from luminaries of the day. It’s gratifying to witness the independent Mary growing into a forceful standard bearer for her family as she lays claim to her position as clan chieftain, the first woman to do so.
A pleasantly engaging read for historical fiction fans.Pub Date: July 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781685134761
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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