The pomp, circumstance, and ungodly intrigue attendant on the election of a new Pope provide a dramatic setting for this diverting, albeit message-laden, fiction from the prolific Father Greeley (Angel Light, 1995, etc.), It's the near future, and the incumbent Holy Father has gone to his heavenly reward, bringing a flock of cardinals to the Eternal City to choose a successor. Among them is Chicago's Sean, Cardinal Cronin, an influential hierarch who's convinced the Church needs a more liberal, less authoritarian prelate than the late pontiff. While he lobbies fellow electors on behalf of Luis, Cardinal Mendoza of Valencia, his crafty aide Auxiliary Bishop John Blackwood (Blackie) Ryan works the press. Among those Bishop Blackie recruits for the cause are New York Times reporter Dennis (Dinny) Molloy and his estranged wife, Patricia McLaughlin, a gorgeous redhead who is a star correspondent for CNN. But before the progressives can get their man into the Vatican, they must do battle with reactionary forces who will stop at nothing to preserve the status quo. In the meantime, Dinny (whom worldly-wise clerics have prodded along the path toward reconciliation with Patty) is investigating the possibility that an Italian wheeler-dealer may have lost millions out of the Apostolic See's patrimony. Despite the scandal uncovered by Dinny; constant controversy in the media, and ecclesiastic conclaves over sensitive issues (birth control, celibacy, the ordination of women, etc.); a kidnapping; unchristian conduct; and a host of other obstacles, white smoke finally issues from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, signaling a new papacy and, perhaps, a turning point in Church history. Greeley doesn't shrink from using his narrative gifts to promote putatively greater goods, but the agreeable confection here is the easier to swallow for its leavening of cynical, secular takes on the doctrinal and political realities obtaining in one of the world's great religions. (Author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-85814-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
A bold, fertile work lit by powerful images, often consumed by debate, almost old-school in its feminist commitment.
Esther, the Old Testament teenager who reluctantly married a Persian king and saved her people, is connected across the ages to two more contemporary women in a sinuous, thoughtful braid of women’s unceasing struggles for liberty and identity.
Biblical Esther, second-wave feminist Vee, and contemporary mother-of-two Lily are the women whose narrative strands and differing yet sometimes parallel dilemmas are interwoven in Solomon’s (Leaving Lucy Pear, 2016, etc.) questing, unpredictable new novel. All three are grappling—some more dangerously than others—with aspects of male power versus their own self-determination. Esther, selected from 40 virgins to be the second queen—after her predecessor, Vashti, was banished (or worse)—is the strangest. Her magical powers can bring on a shocking physical transformation or reanimate a skeletal bird, yet she is still a prisoner in a gilded cage, mother to an heir, frustrated daughter of an imperiled tribe. Vee, wife of an ambitious senator in 1970s Washington, finds herself a player in a House of Cards–type scenario, pressured toward sexual humiliation by her unscrupulous husband. Lily, in 21st-century Brooklyn, has chosen motherhood over work and is fretting about the costumes for her two daughters to wear at the Purim carnival honoring Esther. Alongside questions of male dominance, issues of sexuality arise often, as do female communities, from Esther’s slave sisters to Vee’s consciousness-raising groups to Lily’s sewing circle. And while layers of overlap continue among the three women's stories—second wives, sewing, humming—so do subtly different individual choices. Finely written and often vividly imagined, this is a cerebral, interior novel devoted to the notion of womanhood as a composite construction made up of myriad stories and influences.
A bold, fertile work lit by powerful images, often consumed by debate, almost old-school in its feminist commitment.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-25701-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
Blurring the edges between history and fiction, this achingly mournful work impresses with its grave empathy.
A celebrated Israeli novelist’s visit to Amsterdam, the city where he was born, triggers the search for his origins that—unknowingly—he has been waiting to make his entire life.
Paying thoughtful homage to the Jews of Amsterdam, trapped in the Nazis' inexorable vise of persecution, Israeli writer Elon (If You Awaken Love, 2007, etc.) has composed a story of love, loss, and yearning, expressed through the creation of a novel within a novel. Her central character, writer Yoel Blum, was instructed by his mother never to visit the city from which she, Yoel, and his sister fled, but after her death he makes the trip and accidentally sees a clip of prewar film that opens up questions of identity he feels compelled to explore. So Yoel settles in Amsterdam, in a tacky hotel right near the hospital where he was born, and begins to accumulate notes for a novel through which he will try to make sense of the past. This second story features Sonia, a mother, and her two children, Nettie and Leo, characters who both animate Yoel’s knowledge of the past and accompany him into the present as he wanders the streets, accumulating information, acquaintances, and atmosphere, while slowly coming to terms with the truth. Heavily shadowed with the creeping horrors of the Holocaust—in particular the heart-wrenching choice to hide children and the consequences of that choice—the novel is given weight by its focus on Yoel’s psychology and the mood of a beautiful capital flowing with symbolic dark water. Lyrically phrased and often powerfully visual, the novel has a slow pace, unlike other, perhaps more conventional war stories. However, this deeply felt tale offers a rewarding meditation on survival and on digesting the emotional burdens freely or unknowingly carried.
Blurring the edges between history and fiction, this achingly mournful work impresses with its grave empathy.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3022-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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