A sprawling, engaging saga of two women making their ways through tumultuous American eras.
In Kanter St. Amour’s historical novel, a desperate lawyer finds inspiration in an ancestor’s diary.
San Francisco, 2019: Until recently, attorney Ellie Benvenuto was a rising star at one of the city’s top law firms. Unfortunately, the responsibilities of her home life led to her unceremonious dismissal. The older of Ellie’s two young sons, Luca, was diagnosed with several disabling conditions, and Ellie—who has held primary custody of the boys since her divorce—needed more time to see to Luca’s needs than the firm was willing to give. Now, she works for the Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative, where the paychecks are significantly smaller and the cases are more emotionally draining. Even with her neighbor and best friend, Anika Owens, to lean on, Ellie struggles to figure out how to provide for her family in a world that seems to despise women. When her grandfather dies, the diary of Ellie’s great-great-grandmother, Theodora Ellis, comes into her possession. Teddy (as Theodora was known) recorded her life in the 19th century, including her overland journey from Chicago to San Francisco, her marriage to Klondike miner George DeLuca, and her pioneering work as an architect, suffragist, and philanthropist. As Ellie takes on a tricky case representing an injured immigrant worker and begins a hesitant new relationship with handsome neurosurgeon Sam Varma, she follows Teddy’s chronicle, which includes details of Teddy’s (and her husband’s) polyamorous relationship with an Indigenous couple and accounts of Teddy dressing as a man in order to move in male spaces. (“He seemed to have his eyes turned upwards, looking practically at the ceiling and I realized that my hat probably does add at least a foot to my height,” recounts Teddy of a colleague responding to her attire. “He told me he had never seen a woman in a tuxedo. I said, ‘Well you have now!’”) Can Teddy’s experiences from more than a century ago help Ellie make sense of the possibilities of her own time?
The author’s descriptive prose is especially vibrant in the book’s Teddy sections, which sparkle with details of a former world. “The shaft I work currently goes 2,000 feet into the ground each day,” writes the woman of her days mining silver in Virginia City, Nevada. “I am lowered down like a rat in a bucket, straight into the mouth of the furnace. The heat is unbearable. The men work in overalls and nothing else, but I of course cannot take off my shirt.” The Ellie material is slightly duller by comparison, though Kanter St. Amour infuses her story with compellingly topical concerns about work, marginalization, and the struggles of parenthood. Though the narratives echo one another more than they directly interact, readers will draw the connections between Teddy’s eagerness to flaunt expectations for women in her own time and Ellie’s relatable struggles to lift up herself and the women around her. Thoughtful without ever losing its breezy pacing, this narrative will please readers of both contemporary and historical fiction.
A sprawling, engaging saga of two women making their ways through tumultuous American eras.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798992752816
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Pactum Factum Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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