Readers patient enough to soldier through to the payoff will not be disappointed.
Fortier (Juliet, 2010, etc.) presents the intertwining stories of a young English philologist, tutored by her grandmother in the ways of Amazon warriors, and an Amazon queen of pre–Trojan War days.
Diana Morgan, a professor at Oxford, has been haunted by memories of her grandmother, whom her parents thought mentally unbalanced. All Diana has left of Granny is the old lady’s notebook—filled with indecipherable scribbles in an archaic alphabet—and the bronze, jackal-headed bracelet that Diana somehow has never been able to remove from her wrist. Lately, Diana has been similarly unable to resist researching rumors of an Amazon treasure somewhere in Turkey, which has put her in contact with some shady characters. Soon, Diana is trekking from the Algerian desert (where she found samples of Granny’s script in the ruins of an Amazon temple) to Crete (where she’s mugged while snooping in the famous labyrinth) to the putative site of the city of Troy itself. Accompanied by her best friend, Rebecca, and international man of mystery Nick (known to be involved with al-Aqrab, a quasi-terrorist organization dedicated to recovering ancient artifacts stolen by colonialists), Diana finds herself torn between reconnecting with her Amazon heritage and falling in love with a man. Her ancient counterpart, Myrina (traces of whom Diana has found in various ruins and writings), lands in a similar predicament. After Greek raiders sack the temple of the Moon Goddess (the ruin investigated by Diana), Myrina follows her abducted sisters all the way to Crete, and then to Mycenae, where, aided by Paris, crown prince of Troy, she rescues the women from the clutches of King Agamemnon. After a brief sojourn in Ephesus, Myrina and Paris admit that their destiny is to rule Troy together. Aficionados of Greek mythology and Homeric lore will find much to admire here, although the modern-day sections are encumbered with too many characters and overly intricate plot scaffolding.
Readers patient enough to soldier through to the payoff will not be disappointed.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53622-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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