A poignant, intriguing, and soulful Western with memorable protagonists.
Ill-fated lovers team up to bring a measure of justice to the Wild West in Lederman’s historical novel.
Caleb McRae, born in 1876, is the son of a banker in Greenwich, Connecticut. Handsome, hale, and wealthy, his future seemed secure. But at 18, disturbed by desires he knew were unholy and inspired by dime-store Westerns, he left home for Texas, content to have been disinherited and left to make his own way in the world. He is a man bent on bringing God and justice to the unwieldy West. Caleb joins the Texas Rangers and acquires a stellar reputation, and then, in 1900, his life is forever changed. An outlaw named Henry Midnight is reported to be running roughshod over the territory, stealing cattle and jewels from the wealthy white ranchers. After days of tracking him, Caleb finds Henry weeping next to his beloved Arabian horse, now dead. During the long journey back to El Paso, Caleb learns Henry is the son of a British Peer; like Caleb, Henry found himself entranced by the West, and he has found a home among the Hopi and the Apache (“He’d attended lectures in ethnology at Oxford before coming to the States to study the aboriginal Americans and learn their ways”). He too is seeking justice—for those who were displaced and discarded by the wealthy white invaders. So begins Lederman’s beguiling five-decade-long queer love story about two men committed to their own versions of righteousness and salvation—and, especially, to one another, through both heartbreak and reconciliation. Articulately and sensitively composed, with vivid primary and secondary characters, the narrative contains a satisfying amount of action, including gunfights, brawls, and close calls with the law. But what engages the two avengers (and likely readers as well) most are the bracing intellectual, philosophical, and theological debates they enjoy so thoroughly—Henry counters Caleb’s evangelistic sermons with compelling Hopi mysticism and creation stories. The heavy doses of Christian doctrine that permeate the narrative begin to weigh it down, but the delightfully witty dialogue shared by the two lovers brings refreshing lightness to a complex tale.
A poignant, intriguing, and soulful Western with memorable protagonists.Pub Date: July 24, 2025
ISBN: 9780998603087
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Azure Star, LLC
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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