An entertaining, if heavy-breathing, re-creation of classical Greece at its manliest.
The ancient Greek city-state of Sparta runs on war and gay passion in this period novel.
Marshall University classics professor Lloyd bases his book on the life of fourth-century B.C.E. Spartan King Agesilaos II, who fought many battles in Persia, Greece, and, in his 80s, Egypt. The sprawling narrative unfolds in episodic chapters told from the points of view of characters around Agesilaos—family and friends, military subordinates, political rivals, servants—who get embroiled in the historical events of his reign. Through them, the author paints a rich portrait of Spartan life, taking in everything from hairstyles to interpretation of Delphic oracles and fleshing out its harsh warrior ethos, which blends ruthless elitism with stoic self-sacrifice. Spartans casually murder slaves; youths gouge out opponents’ eyes in friendly wrestling competitions; soldiers charge into battlefield blood baths; and their mothers celebrate when they die heroically. Lloyd’s Sparta also has homoeroticism in its bones thanks to the custom of older men taking younger male lovers as well as high standards of physical fitness and a general disregard for clothing. Characters wrestle in the nude, run footraces in the nude, harvest grain in the nude, attack the enemy army in the nude, and gather firewood on snowy mornings in the nude. The book is thus suffused with an ogling sexual tension that proceeds to sexual release in the many graphic love scenes, which include brotherly incest. The author’s storytelling, centered on the wily, charismatic figure of Agesilaos, has a Homeric ring to it in its gripping, gory fight scenes (“Another splintered spear, not the king’s, ran through the youth’s throat, spewing a fountain of blood, as from some gigantic sacrificial bull”), its lyrical pastorals (“He jumped into the cold stream, and like the piercing and sudden aching that comes with a fevered sickness, the river’s current swept through him”), and its sometimes stilted speechifying. (“My friends, I cannot be more thankful than I am to this, the greatest king of the Spartans in their long history, this Agesilaos, an unassuming and quiet man.”) The sex can be intrusive, but Lloyd’s vigorous prose and immersive evocation of this storied era are often captivating.
An entertaining, if heavy-breathing, re-creation of classical Greece at its manliest.Pub Date: March 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59021-279-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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
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