A fast-paced, easily digestible historical epic.
Williamson presents a tale of early-20th-century German South West Africa (now Namibia), told from a white colonist’s point of view.
In 1903, a young German named Conrad Huber receives the position of commissioner’s aide at the German Colonial Office in South West Africa. There, he stays in Commissioner Leutwein’s home in Windhoek, where he meets Sybille, who works in the commissioner’s office and is the daughter of Samuel Maharero, leader of the local Herero people. Due to ongoing struggles between Leutwein and Maj. Dietrich Baumhauer, the leader of the local militia, Conrad and Sybille are sent to negotiate with Maharero. Conrad soon rushes back to Leutwein, leaving Sybille with plans to reunite in Windhoek later, and he soon finds himself in the midst of a rebellion that results in Leutwein’s resignation and Conrad’s promotion to the Colonial Office’s Chief Expert under Gen. Lothar von Trotha. A battle with the Herero then ensues; Conrad receives a debilitating leg injury and is saved by his cousin Georg, who’s stationed in Windhoek. Von Trotha employs aggressive, inhumane tactics: “The Hottentots are savage and cowardly dogs,” he says at one point, employing an offensive term for the local inhabitants. “Murderous, villainous cannibals that must be put down!” Meanwhile, Conrad uses his new authority to track down the missing Sybille. Overall, Williamson deftly weaves an engaging story of adventure while taking care not to minimize the horrors inflicted upon the region’s people by Western European colonists. Readers may take exception to the fact that the story is told entirely from Conrad’s viewpoint; the author, in an afterword, notes this: “I have attempted to use my own lens to turn the white knight trope upside down and show how utterly helpless, out of place and unwanted such a ‘hero’ is.” The story’s structure is easy to follow, and although the author employs a certain amount of creative license to sustain the plot (the real-life Maharero didn’t have a German wife and a daughter named Sybille, for instance), it’s still firmly anchored in historical fact, including the horrific Battle of Waterberg, in which thousands of Herero soldiers and their families were killed.
A fast-paced, easily digestible historical epic.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9798350930801
Page Count: 458
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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