A rousing good read, nevertheless, and a welcome addition to a quite considerable (and really rather underrated) body of...
The legend of Roderick the Beardless—the ninth-century hero who was in fact a heroine—is given fictional form in Holland’s lively and entertaining 23rd novel.
Protagonist Ragny, daughter of Spain’s Queen Ingunn, flees following her mother’s death from the heavy-breathing clutches of Ingunn’s oafish consort Markold the Grim. Donning male garb and adopting the name Roderick, Ragny and her companion-in-arms Seffrid (Markold’s former “sergeant”) journey to the neighboring kingdom of Francia (ruled by Charlemagne’s grandson, the “slipshod little King” Charles), and help defend it from marauding “Northmen.” Having proven “himself” a mighty warrior, Roderick is given the hand of the king’s unwilling daughter Alpaida—and the inevitable revelation of Ragny’s true identity sends her to prison and a sentence of trial by fire to determine whether she is—as the suggestible Charles fears—a shape-shifting witch. The story’s resolution, accomplished through the agency of what may indeed be supernatural means, fittingly crowns Ragny’s adventures, and ends—as any legend worth its salt must—with a hard-won restoration of order. Holland (An Ordinary Woman, 1999, etc.) is a real master of historical fiction. She writes crisp, swift sentences, offers intensely sensory visualizations (e.g., “The trail began to drop away under them, so that his horse leaned back and slid stiff-legged with each step on the hard rock”), constructs vivid action scenes, and judiciously mingles her characters’ introspective moments with the surrounding drama—stumbling only by employing King Charles reminiscences a bit too overtly as exposition, and with occasionally supercharged rhetoric (as when Ragny and Leovild, the courageous knight who wins her, meet in a climactic embrace: “Her mouth was like the rose, and he the bee”).
A rousing good read, nevertheless, and a welcome addition to a quite considerable (and really rather underrated) body of work.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-86890-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
A tired and disillusioned longtime CIA operative in Vietnam is ordered to terminate one of his agents, also his only friend, as Simpson (A Very Large Consulate, 1988; etc.) continues to mine his 1950s and '60s past as a USIA officer in Vietnam. Bob Fraser is from the new old school of US diplomats in Vietnam, sharper than the virtual colonialists who preceded him and something of an old fogy beside the new kids, with their trim physiques and fluidity in Vietnamese. Relegated to a quiet coastal backwater town after an ``incident'' in Saigon, Fraser is somnambulistic and hardly able to imagine a future for himself. (Indeed, he seems to have no past either: Simpson leaves Fraser bereft of family background or physical description, and hardly even mentions his name until well into the book.) Fraser finally wakes up, however, when he is ordered to assassinate one of his own men, Arnaud Caze, a former French agent whom Fraser later recruited. Caze has been Fraser's one buddy and confidante in Vietnam since the two met outside a cafÇ bombing soon after Fraser's arrival. They share a common cynicism and a growing sense of walking in place beside ``someone else's war.'' Fraser, though, is shocked when told that Caze is a double-agent working for the North Vietnamese. A botched assassination attempt during a fishing trip puts Fraser officially off the job but unofficially on the streets of Saigon with a loaded gun. As luck would have it, it's the weekend of the Tet holiday 1968. While the city explodes around them, Fraser and Caze fight their private, and not so private, battle. Fraser's (lack of) character is unfortunate, and the story unfolds slowly and with little suspense, but, still, it's an interesting one, set in a place and time that Simpson evokes with skill and obvious knowledge.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-57488-000-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Lester (The Last Tales of Uncle Remus, 1994, etc.) offers a potentially controversial and intimate account of the life and death of a black civil rights leader as told 25 years later by the leader himself and the people who loved him. John Calvin Marshall—a fictional Martin Luther King Jr.- -speculates about the movement he led and its unintended consequences. Were the costs too high? As John grapples with this question, three casualties of the movement assess its cost to their own lives in an effort to free themselves from John's burdensome legacy: Andrea, the wife who resented his work during his lifetime and became a national symbol of it as his widow; Lisa Adams, John's white personal secretary and lover who lost everything when he died and she was thrust from the movement; and Bobby Card, the black organizer who sacrificed his youth and sanity for love of John. The three of them are reunited as Andrea lies dying of a stroke in a hospital in Nashville. Lisa leaves her mountain in Vermont to sit with the comatose Andrea and ask for forgiveness and perhaps for permission to move on. Amazingly, Andrea is able to give her both and, at the same time, free herself. In her turn, Lisa helps Bobby forgive himself for not hating whites enough, a terrible weakness in his mind. Lisa and Bobby leave each other with real hope for the future. The future of the movement is more doubtful, however, just as its past is ambiguous. The answer to John's original question is never stated explicitly, but perhaps hope can be found in the Andrea-Lisa-Bobby microcosm. Ultimately, however, Lester leaves John Calvin Marshall's question unanswered because it is unanswerable. A forceful and startling look into the minds and hearts of those involved in the civil rights movement, this novel raises compelling questions about the successes and failures of that movement.
Pub Date: June 27, 1994
ISBN: 1-55970-258-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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