In this intriguing debut novel the author imagines the life of Jesus, recast as a woman.
Partially inspired by Elaine Pagels’ scholarly The Gnostic Gospels, Wolf creates an alternative understanding of Jesus, as a non-deity healer who espouses a spiritual connection to a feminine earth. The novel opens with Anna as a tomboy devoted to her mother Mari and frightened of her father Yoseph, a tyrannical adherent to the new religion. The old religion (Mari was a follower) promoted gender equality and valued the role of women as regenerators of life. Few are left who practice the old ways, but those who do, like Nazareth’s Zahra, are both revered for their ability to heal, and shunned. When tragedy befalls Mari, and Zahra is stoned to death, Joseph disguises Anna as a boy and sells her to a passing band of shepherds. But this is no ordinary group of men; it is led by Solomon (Zahra’s son, who was told of a special child) and Judas, Guardians of The Way. It is Solomon and Judas’ duty to one day take their new shepherd to the Sisters. Meanwhile, Anna, who knows nothing of The Way or Solomon’s connection to Zahra, renames herself Jesus and lives quite happily as a boy, with her new best friend Peter. As Jesus grows older and stronger, he becomes a skilled shepherd. Solomon sends him on a journey, knowing he will be “captured” by the Sisters. Anna is among them for years where they live a monastic life recording spiritual and medical knowledge, practicing a kind of telepathic communication and preparing the chosen few to become Awakeners, women who dangerously set out to spread The Way. But the times are hostile to women and a massacre destroys their whole society, save Anna and two others. The three venture out, now with Anna as the man Jesus, who has a message for the world. Wolf cleverly uses the story of Jesus to create an alternate ending to the Crucifixion, in which the Sister’s message of peace is perverted, but her insertion of a kind of New Age philosophy somewhat diminishes an otherwise fascinating idea.
Pub Date: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-71769-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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