An engaging, though unpolished tale of an ice age migration.
An epic novel examines a possible prehistoric immigration to the Americas.
In this volume, Matthews (Tuksook’s Story, 2014, etc.) introduces a group of heroes who call themselves the SealEaters, who need to leave their coastal home before encroaching glaciers push them into the sea. An expedition sets out to inspect the land on the far side of the ocean in search of a new home. When the members reach land, they split up—not least because Reg, the leader, is abusive and hated—and subsequent chapters follow their individual paths. In one section, a SealEater named Murke assesses the terrain: “We loved the great grassland, but it was very time consuming to cross it to the land where the trees began. It was, we thought, not a place for the SealEaters to live. We needed to have the closeness of forest.” The SealEaters encounter tribes already living in the area, some hostile and others willing to welcome the immigrants. The SealEaters teach their hosts how to make their unique spear points, and several marry into the communities they find. Others return to bring the rest of their people to the new world, and find that the tribe has grown stronger thanks to Reg’s absence. Matthews, a thorough researcher, draws a detailed portrait of ice age life, particularly as she narrates the creation of the spear points: “He twisted the stone back and forth looking across the edges he’d made. He’d cease tapping and rub briskly a stone across the newly formed edge to dull it.” The prose, however, is often disjointed (“She smiled. She made the sign for breaking a stick or bone. She shook her head negatively”; “He was reaching the end of his patience and available points to make”) and some of the primitive terminology (“thinking place” for “mind” and “go black” for “sleep”) can be grating. Readers seeking dynamic female characters will not find them among the primarily male protagonists, who engage with the women as wives to be taken. Despite these flaws, Matthews has produced an adventure story that plausibly explores a leading theory of human migration, bringing an imagination to the scant facts contained in the archaeological record. The multitude of characters moves the book in the direction of a saga, allowing it to represent a wide experience of prehistory.
An engaging, though unpolished tale of an ice age migration.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59433-600-3
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Publication Consultants
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2016
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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