A solid, if somewhat slow, follow-up novel about a Greek warrior and spy.
A soldier fights for home and family in this second installment of an epic series.
In Kachel’s (Spoils of Olympus: By the Sword, 2014) sequel, Greek combatant and spy Andrikos and his mentor, Vettias, continue their quest to defend the heirs of Alexander the Great amid a dangerous civil war. After the death of Gen. Eumenes, the two spies must ingratiate themselves with their new leader and former enemy, Antigonus. Andrikos continues to hone his skills as he and Vettias conduct assassinations, plant rumors, and generally attempt to undermine their enemies. While Andrikos navigates a web of political intrigue, he also develops a personal life. He reunites with a woman named Mara only to find out she has given birth to their child, a son called Talos. The couple enjoy a series of clandestine meetings, reinforcing their love for each other, before Andrikos makes his move and wins his family back. But a family can be a complicating factor for a spy whose life is often at risk. When Antigonus instructs Andrikos to bring the remaining heirs of Alexander to their side, Andrikos faces a treacherous mission where he must make choices that could endanger his life and the well-being of his newfound family. Kachel presents another well-researched novel that explores a fascinating but overlooked period of Greek history. His descriptions of military life, especially the intrigue and the battles, are spot-on. He includes a huge cast of characters, many of whom are pulled straight from the pages of history. But the sheer volume of names and alliances can be difficult to keep straight. A bigger problem is the slow pacing of the narrative. Warring generals continue to vie for power with little lasting success and few tangible plot developments. Thankfully, the narrative gains steam toward the end, when Andrikos returns to his hometown and then embarks on his mission to rescue the heirs of Alexander. Kachel continues to skillfully develop Andrikos’ character. Some of Kachel’s best scenes depict his hero’s relatable struggle to balance his personal and professional lives as the young man grows into his roles of spy, husband, and father.
A solid, if somewhat slow, follow-up novel about a Greek warrior and spy.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5368-2566-4
Page Count: 334
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2017
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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