Overly long, too convoluted, and populated by fight scenes that prove tiresomely detailed, this novel progresses in a zigzag...
In this sequel to The French Executioner (2014), Humphreys mixes old world with new as the saga of Anne Boleyn’s severed hand—and the power that’s attributed to it—inspires court intrigue, star-crossed love, and witchcraft.
When men with perfidy on their minds exhume the body of Henry VIII’s Protestant queen, Anne Boleyn, they’re surprised to find that her head wasn’t the only thing she lost when she died: she’s also missing one hand, and it’s not an ordinary one. Many believe the six-fingered hand has special powers, but for Renard the Fox, it represents an opportunity to control Princess Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne. Meanwhile, Jean Rombaud, the French executioner who took Anne’s head, then removed and buried her hand at her request, is in besieged Siena standing alongside his lifelong friends, a Norseman named Haakon and the German they call The Fugger; he knows the siege means the end of his life in Siena. Rombaud's son Gianni is a Catholic fanatic working for Renard, and he won’t let anything get in the way of his finding Anne’s hand and using it. In the series’ first book, Jean risked his life to ensure the dead queen's hand was safely buried, and he has no desire to embark on another quest. But when Gianni brings the quest to him, Jean knows that he will, once again, take up Anne’s cause and do what he can to honor the dead queen’s memory. Divided into two parts, set in Europe and the New World, the author’s ambitious undertaking is detailed and sometimes fascinating, but the rambling storyline often goes off the rails—especially when it crosses the Atlantic—with a cast fleshed out by an embarrassment of characters who appear for a scene or two and then vanish, leaving behind very little literary value in their wakes.
Overly long, too convoluted, and populated by fight scenes that prove tiresomely detailed, this novel progresses in a zigzag pattern that readers will find confusing.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8230-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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