A rich, fictionalized account of a little-known region’s past and present.
Stores (Christian Science, 2004) explores the history of Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec in this short story collection.
The author presents fictionalized accounts of five centuries worth of invasions, rebellions, and elections in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—a region of Mexico long renowned for its unique culture and fiercely independent spirit. The stories range from Zapotec peasants receiving Aztec merchants in Tehuantepec in 1495, to the city of Juchitán establishing local, leftist autonomy in the 1980s. In these tales, the isthmus is a place of passions and legends, with a long history of exploitation by outsiders; as Mexico-based author Nancy Davies writes in her foreword, it “historically has been an area of conflict, like all geographic areas that serve as crossroads, trade routes, and strategic guardians for empires made or in the making.” Stores’ tales take readers through these many conflicts, from the final free days of the Zapotec Binni gula’sa’ people to the Spanish conquest, through the Rebellion of 1660 and the French intervention two centuries later, up to the Mexican Revolution and the clashes between national and local parties in the second half of the 20th century. The 11 stories, along with supplementary materials, offer a glimpse at this little-visited area of Mexico, where the gulf is closest to the Pacific Ocean. Stores is a capable writer, adeptly handling the shifting languages and cultures that enter and exit the narratives. His characters sometimes feel a bit flat, as their emotional complexity is generally secondary to their participation in significant events; the didactic aim of the book reveals itself in long passages of historical exposition. This is less a book of historical fiction than one that uses fiction as a tool to teach history. Once readers realize this, however, the collection becomes quite enjoyable, as the landscapes, cultures, and clashes are engaging and likely unknown to most English-language readers. The comprehensive historical coverage persuasively contextualizes the troubles and political desires of the region’s modern population. Like every contemporary place, it continues to experience a long, difficult birth.
A rich, fictionalized account of a little-known region’s past and present.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-1440174889
Page Count: 392
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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