This historical novel offers an unusual situation, but the trappings of the story are not as fresh.
A young Black woman in 19th-century London takes a job as a dying white man’s nurse and becomes an amateur detective.
In 1833, Hester Reeves arrives for the first day of a new job at a foreboding mansion called Tall Trees. Hester is 23, a free Black woman who uses the title “doctoress” to indicate her skills as an herbalist. Up to now, she has used those skills mainly to treat the city’s sex workers at King’s Cross, with the support of her kind husband, Jos. Hester’s mother has died, leaving her to care for Willa, her pretty and headstrong younger sister. Willa’s factory job has brought her to the attention of her rakish boss, and Hester wants to move her family out of the city, farther from such temptations. So she jumps at the chance to undertake the care of the wealthy Gervaise Cherville for a month, as he settles his affairs before moving to his country estate to live out his last days. Hester’s skills are suitable—Gervaise is dying of syphilis—and the pay generous enough to finance a move. She soon discovers Gervaise wants something more from her. Years ago, he brought several enslaved women from his family’s plantation in Honduras to London. They escaped, but he is haunted by them and wants Hester’s help to find out their fates. She proves to be a good detective, but her discovery of what happened to the women could ruin lives. Complicating the situation are Gervaise’s sternly protective housekeeper, Margaret, and his son, Rowland, the very man Hester hopes to distance Willa from, who is eager to get his hands on his father’s estate. The plot has some interesting turns, and Gervaise’s situation as an enslaver coming to terms with his behavior has potential. But the book suffers from stereotypes and limited character development; Hester is so unfailingly upright she can come off as priggish, while Rowland is such a stereotypical villain he almost twirls a mustache. But with brisk pacing and plentiful historical detail, it’s still an entertaining read.
This historical novel offers an unusual situation, but the trappings of the story are not as fresh.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780358627920
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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