Publisher's Weekly Review
Walls's breathtaking latest (after The Silver Star) traces the trajectory of two feuding Virginia families and a woman who rises to the top of a bootlegging empire. For more than 50 years, bad blood has permeated relations between the bootlegging Kincaid family and the Bond brothers, starting with the Kincaids' questionable acquisition of 88 acres from the Bonds. Sallie Kincaid's enigmatic father, "the Duke," controls an Emporium general store, warehouse, lumber mill, hauling company, and rental properties, and after a string of unexpected deaths in the family, Sallie takes charge of the family business during the Prohibition years. As "Queen of the Kincaid Rumrunners," Sally comes to oversee a profitable business that amplifies the backwoods dispute into a full-fledged violent war with the Bonds, who avenge the Kincaids' land grab with a calamitous act of escalation, entangling both families and exposing scandalous secrets. The thrilling plot culminates in bombshell revelations and massive conflagrations, and through it all Sallie makes for an indelible heroine as she fights for her life and livelihood. This is a stunner. Agent: Margaret Riley King and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME. (Mar.)
Library Journal Review
Following Hargrave's adult debut, the Betty Trask honoree The Mercies, The Dance Tree spins off from real-life events as it visits 1518 Strasbourg, France, where women have begun dancing wildly in the town square and provoked a state of emergency (40,000-copy first printing). Opening in a fishing village in British colonial--ruled Singapore, Suicide Club author Heng's The Great Reclamation features a sweet boy with an extraordinary gift--he sees shifting islands no one else can--who comes of age during the Japanese occupation and, with a neighborhood girl, ends up remapping the future (75,000-copy first printing). Following the multi-best-booked Yellow Wind, Johnson's The House of Eve intertwines the stories of two young Black women--15-year-old Ruby, whose college ambitions are threatened by an ill-advised affair, and Howard University student Eleanor, looking for acceptance from her boyfriend's elite Black family. In Loesch's debut, The Last Russian Doll, a Russian émigré studying at Oxford returns to Moscow after her mother's death and uncovers a family tragedy stretching back to the 1917 Revolution. A prize winner in Germany and a publishing phenomenon there and in the UK, where Berlin-based British-Ghanian Otoo is a Cambridge writer in residence, Ada's Room features four Adas: a 15th-century West African woman who confronts a Portuguese slave trader, Victorian England's Ada Lovelace, a Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp inmate, and a contemporary resident of Berlin, connected to them all in spirit. Following The Yellow Bird Sings, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, Rosner's Once We Were Home builds on real-life events to tell the stories of Jewish children wrenched from their families during World War II--like Ana, who remembers the mother who smuggled her out of a Polish ghetto, and Ana's brother, who knows only the family who raised him. In Spence-Ash's Beyond That, the Sea, Bea Thompson is sent from bomb-blasted World War II London to live in safety with a family in Boston, MA, and becomes so contented with her new life that she is reluctant to return home (150,000-copy first printing). From the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Walls, Hang the Moon follows the life of feisty young Sallie Kincaid, daughter of the big man about town in Prohibition-era Virginia, who's back home to reclaim her place nine years after being ejected from the family. The USA Today best-selling Webb's Strangers in the Night replays the romance between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner (100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). In Two Wars and a Wedding, the New York Times best-selling Willig follows aspiring archaeologist Betsy Hayes from 1896 Greece, where she ends up tending the wounded as fighting breaks out with Turkey, and 1898 Cuba, where she serves with the Red Cross during the Spanish American War, hoping to find a lost friend (75,000-copy first printing).