An educational yet adventurous novel that will leave readers eagerly anticipating the next installment.
A hero comes into his own in Kachel’s debut work of historical fiction.
Alexander the Great is dead, his empire in chaos. Following his death, former allies fight to gain control of Alexander’s realm, which is divided among his heirs. Andrikos is a young man growing up in Ilandra during this time of violence and political turmoil. Though he admires the courage of Alexander’s military, Andrikos whiles away with ill-advised friendships and skirts the edge of a criminal existence. The young man is forced to leave his hometown following a violent encounter and the painful death of a friend. He seeks refuge with the army in hopes that he will grow into a strong, courageous man who can someday return home. His training and initiation are brutal, yet Andrikos proves himself to his colleagues and superiors. He’s recruited to assist a mysterious organization called the King’s Hand, a shadowy group dedicated to protecting Alexander’s rightful heirs. With the help of his mentor, Vettias, Andrikos soon learns the arts of coercion and espionage, skills requiring a kind of finesse far different from the brute force essential on the battlefront. Accompanied by the beautiful prostitute Mara, the two men travel on a far-flung mission to infiltrate the highest levels of a royal court and to ensure that the rightful heir to Alexander comes out victorious. Kachel’s novel, the first in a planned series, is a thoroughly researched addition to the genre. The accounts of daily life in the Greek army are far from glorified; rather, Kachel presents a realistic portrayal of the violence inherent to the life of a soldier. Though the plot drags at times—specifically during battle scenes—once Andrikos is engaged by Vettias and the King’s Hand, the narrative takes off. Kachel does a wonderful job portraying the development of Andrikos from awkward, immature youth to confident and skilled operative. Kachel brings to life a huge cast of characters and does an admirable job fleshing them out, particularly Andrikos and the complicated Vettias. Thanks to evocative writing and impressive research, the world of the ancient Greeks feels closer than ever.
An educational yet adventurous novel that will leave readers eagerly anticipating the next installment.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502703378
Page Count: 368
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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