A thoughtful and spicy historical romance.
A young dowager duchess falls in love with another Duke of Dedham.
Valencia, Dowager Duchess of Dedham, is ready to enjoy life. After several difficult years with her husband before his death, followed by the mandatory mourning period, she’s celebrating her birthday with a boat ride to the “infamous dark walks” of Vauxhall. She may even look for a gentleman to enjoy it with, but unfortunately, the only ones she meets are the young bucks who rescue her after she falls into the Thames, including one attractive but judgmental man she can’t stop thinking about. The next morning, she’s stunned to find him in her house. He’s Rhain Lloyd, the reluctant new Duke of Dedham, and he’s arrived from Wales with his mother and six ill-mannered, unmarried sisters in tow. Valencia prepares to pack herself off to her dower house in the country, but the new duke invites her to stay and help his fish-out-of-water sisters acclimate to their new lives. Unsurprisingly, Valencia and Rhain feel an immediate spark, but it isn’t until they both unwittingly attend the same debauched evening at a private “hedonistic playground” that the embers flare into intimacy. Though they tumble from infatuation to true love very quickly, Valencia soon finds secrets from her first marriage coming back to haunt her. The second volume in Jordan’s Scandalous Ladies of London series tells an intriguing story, though it comes to a rather sudden end. The harsh realities of life for women in Georgian-era London add depth to the story, especially as readers come to discover, through flashbacks, just how dangerous Valencia’s late husband had been. The darker elements are balanced with several intense intimate scenes and a sweet, true connection between Valencia and Rhain, and it will hit the spot for Jordan’s many fans.
A thoughtful and spicy historical romance.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780063270749
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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