A wild, gripping ride through West Virginia’s past.
Laws offers a historical novel based on stories from her own family.
In the introduction, the author describes her background with the FBI and working as a private eye—and discusses the degree to which she stuck to the facts in telling the story of her birth family. Her attention to detail is clear in the ways in which she lays out the relationships within the Amoruso family, Italian immigrants “always one meal away from hunger.” They’re a family with nine children; the narrative focuses most closely on Tucker, Jal, Rose, and their mother, Margaret. In the first third of the novel, set in 1928, Laws sketches the aspiring Tucker, a wannabe lawyer engaged to the daughter of local aristocrats, and the unruly, independent, younger Jal, who has little interest in school or respect for the local Ku Klux Klan. Rose, meanwhile, “fashioned herself as a flapper. She was wild, boisterous, and deliciously disgraceful.” Also on the scene is the demonic-seeming Ernie Yost, an antisocial and embittered coal miner who slowly amasses occult literature and ritual objects, including The Gospel of Satan and a severed hand he keeps in a box in his basement. There’s a rather abrupt time jump to 1933, and then again to 1941, but from there the novel settles into longer groove through the 1940s as the central characters navigate the aftermath of early decisions, shifting family roles, and the mounting tension between private ambitions and social expectations. As the characters change and Ernie’s obsessions grow toward dark ends, Laws maintains a steady momentum. There is the occasional info dump or detail that rings true to life but is less narratively satisfying, and the prose can take on the overheated flavor of film noir: “She smoked ciggys and loco weed. She was a full-on boozehound and enjoyed French kissing.” This style also extends to the dialogue, with seemingly ordinary West Virginia women saying things like, “Don’t you want your honeybun to be a Cadillac?” Stylistic quibbles aside, this is a riveting true story with a shocking ending.
A wild, gripping ride through West Virginia’s past.Pub Date: March 14, 2018
ISBN: 9780996133531
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Stroud House Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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