Forbidden desires add to Jamaica’s steamy climate in this compelling historical romance.
Colonial Jamaica brims with longing, heat, and mystery in Graham’s historical novel.
Jamaica in the 1790s is not the island paradise that we know today. Heat, humidity, a constant drone of insects, daily storms, seasonal hurricanes, and natural disasters like earthquakes combine with the colonial problems of slavery, racism, smuggling, and political upheaval to create an ominous backdrop for an engrossing historical romance. Rhiannon Wynne Ross, an outspoken young woman “accustomed to having her opinion respected and her conversation requested,” has come to Jamaica from England to confront her husband, Albert Ross, the owner of the Fain Hill plantation. “An aging widower, he’d married Rhiannon not for companionship but for the chance of an heir—a legitimate heir,” but shortly after their wedding, he abruptly left England to return to Jamaica. While waiting for his return, Rhiannon visits her dear friend, Elisabeth Graham, in Philadelphia, where the dashing Scotsman Liam Brock helps her bid on a boardinghouse she hopes to run. The “grudging friendship” between Liam and Rhiannon grows into a mutual attraction before she leaves for Jamaica to confront her husband about financial matters. Meanwhile, Liam takes on the responsibility of escorting a young woman to Jamaica to reunite with her father, thinking that Rhiannon is on her way back to Philadelphia. However, Rhiannon has stayed in Jamaica, where she learns that her husband’s plantation is almost bankrupt. Circumstances conspire to throw Liam and Rhiannon together repeatedly, and their attraction smolders, rendered sultrily in Graham’s heated prose (“He turned his head to kiss the inside of her wrist, taking care not to scrape it over stubble, and her racing pulse shuddered past the tip of his tongue. He stifled a groan”). Background information about the protagonists is seamlessly woven throughout a well-plotted narrative; this book can be read as a stand-alone, though it is the third in a series. Written with sensitivity and remarkable insight into the lives of women, the enslaved, and other populations relegated to the margins of colonial history, this is an absorbing yarn.
Forbidden desires add to Jamaica’s steamy climate in this compelling historical romance.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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