A sometimes-moving and narratively inventive portrait of a member of the Roman imperial family.
A daughter of a Roman emperor is exiled to an isolated island where she reflects on the ruins of her life in Driscoll’s debut historical novel.
Giulia is the 37-year-old daughter of Caesar Augustus, but her life has been a punishing one; she was forced into a politically motivated marriage with her brother, Tiberius, a cruel man who subjected her to horrible abuse. Also, her two previous husbands died, and her eagerly anticipated child with Tiberius was stillborn. Later, she’s caught in an embarrassing indiscretion and charged by her own father with a “wanton love of spirits and licentious behaviour”—an offense against public morality. She’s ignominiously exiled for five years to an isolated island, Pandateria, an “earthly paradise” to some but to her a “living hell.” It’s made even worse by the fact that her personal servant, Phoebe, a faithful friend, is so burdened by guilt about Giulia’s fate that she commits suicide. Driscoll tells this tale—which is, by turns, soap-operatically dramatic and affectingly poignant—not only from Giulia’s point of view, but also from those of her servants, and the result is a complex, kaleidoscopic perspective. Giulia’s inimitable style of narration is plainly declarative and irreverent, by turns: “Speculation has it that our arranged marriage was the catalyst that triggered [Tiberius’] peculiar behaviour and his increasing lust for virgins and young boys. I can attest that…his perverse acts of sexual deviance and cruelty are nothing new. I have bite marks to prove this.” Her crew of servants is intriguing, as well, led by Damaris, a young woman whose foot was run over by a carriage in Rome and who’s happy to leave behind the clamor and bustle of that city behind her.
A sometimes-moving and narratively inventive portrait of a member of the Roman imperial family.Pub Date: March 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-52-558950-8
Page Count: 180
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.
Four kids who swore an oath of friendship reunite as adults to face their fears.
The foundation of this novel is a consciously employed trope about messed-up kids, from the Losers Club in Stephen King’s It (1986) to more recent groupings of youth gone wrong in everything from Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids (2017) to Gerard Way’s The Umbrella Academy comic-book series. Here, it’s five kids from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, circa 1998: charismatic Matty, cynical Nick, carefree Hamish, cool-ahead-of-her-time Lore-née-Lauren, and nervous nail-biter Owen. Each burdened with terrible families, they create a pact, the Covenant: “It’s how they’re there for each other. How they’ll do anything for each other. Get revenge. Take a beating. Do what needs doing.” But when they discover the titular staircase during a camping trip and their impulsive leader Matty disappears while climbing it, the band breaks up. Decades later, Lore is a successful game designer, having abandoned Owen to his anxieties, while Hamish has become a family man and Nick is dying of pancreatic cancer. When he invokes their pact, the surviving members reassemble at a similar anomaly in the woods to make sense of it all. Climbing another staircase into a liminal space marked with signs saying “This place hates you,” among other things, our not-so-merry band suddenly finds themselves trapped in a haunted house. There’s plenty of catnip for horror fans as these former kids work their way through shifting set pieces—rooms where children were tortured, murdered, and worse, including some tailored specifically to them—but the adversary ultimately leaves something to be desired. The book isn’t as overtly gothic as Black River Orchard (2023) or as propulsive as his techno-thrillers, but Wendig has interesting things to say about friendship and childhood trauma and its reverberations. Lore gets it, near the end: “We’re all really fucked up and just trying to get through life, and it’s better when we do it together instead of alone.”
A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593156568
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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