An often engrossing and well-handled story of the 19th century.
In this historical novel, McIlvain tells a tale of love lost and found during the colonization of Texas in the 1820s.
Susannah Mobley, the white daughter of a country farmer in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, is closer to the enslaved Mama Jess and her son, Philippe, than she is to her own parents. Enslaver Jacob Mobley is a cruel man who treats people, including his daughter, as commodities; Louisa Mobley is often dulled by laudanum. Between 1817 and 1821, the teenage Susannah and Philippe fall in love. Although he tells her that “I’m not strong enough to resist taking you,” she continues seeing him, and they eventually consummate their love out of wedlock. By the time she graduates from New Orleans’ Ursuline Academy in 1821, she’s pregnant with their child. Philippe flees to San Antonio de Béxar in Texas and gives her a ring made of intricately knotted strands of her dark red hair as a sign that he’ll love her forever. To shield Philippe, she claims that the pregnancy is the result of a rape by a runaway enslaved man whom Jacob’s dogs recently killed. Susannah is quickly married to Hezekiah James, a Tennessean on his way to stake a Texas property claim who knows about her pregnancy. During their arduous journey to Texas, they homestead on the Brazos River; Susannah comes to admire and even love Hezekiah for his kindness and leadership. In these pages, McIlvain tells absorbing love stories, but she also explores the interpersonal relationships between enslavers and enslaved people, some of whom grew up together; “We’re like brothers,” says Hezekiah to Mason, a man whom he and his family enslaved. Mason answers that he is, in fact, enslaved to Hezekiah, later adding, “Takes a lot of twisting, Hez, to come up with family.” McIlvain also effectively delves into the friendships that develop between disparate women in a new settlement. Well-known figures from Texas history, including Stephen Austin, Jared Groce, and Baron de Bastrop, make appropriate appearances that add to the book’s feeling of historical verisimilitude.
An often engrossing and well-handled story of the 19th century.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2023
ISBN: 978-4824189271
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Next Chapter
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2024
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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