A lively narrative that should inspire careful consideration of the oceans.
In this debut novel, a sea squirt larva leaves her tide-pool home on a journey of acceptance.
Eleven-year-old Siona Seaton hates the ocean. Unfortunately, her mother, Dr. Seaton, is a marine biologist and has brought her to the beach to collect samples. While she’d like to sit somewhere dry and read, Siona instead explores the tide pools—and gets bit by a ragworm. Later, at home, Dr. Seaton consoles her daughter with the story of Siona the sea squirt, who lived 521.2 million years ago. Siona is a larva, still able to swim before attaching to a rock for the sedentary portion of her life. But her father, Sir Squirt, notices that her head and tail are much bigger than they should be, lamenting, “Not all larvae can be perfect.” He also tells her that only 10 percent of sea squirt larvae survive. Yet Siona believes her large tail can help others, and a neighbor, a Hallucigenia named Helamite, suggests visiting Clarissa the Clairvoyant Clam for advice. Her parents disapprove of the adventure, but Siona hopes to locate Sydney the Sea Star, who knows the secret passage to Clarissa’s tide pool. Danger lurks along the way in the form of pistol shrimp and sea spiders. Liepe’s enjoyable educational novel doesn’t stop with characters based on marine invertebrates from the colorful Cambrian radiation. In this tale that exceptionally smart kids and adults should find entertaining, she packs her prose with science facts from various disciplines, as in the line “Photons of light escaped” the sun “as packets of energy, waves, and particles to bombard and bounce from the shell of a snail.” But some of the concepts—like protein “widgets”—may be tough for younger readers to visualize without a quick web search. The friendly images by debut illustrator Kathleen reveal just how bizarre animals like Anomalocaris canadensis were. Occasionally, Liepe checks in with her human cast, and as Siona learns about the sea, she gradually overcomes her fear of it. Toward the end is a useful warning about ocean acidification and bleached coral, signs that humanity is destroying the foundation of the planet’s abundance.
A lively narrative that should inspire careful consideration of the oceans.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-3896-9
Page Count: 202
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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