A captivating adventure filled with both danger and astute theological inquiry.
Two unlikely candidates are sent on a dangerous mission by the Pope to Constantinople at the dawn of the 13th century in Cycon’s historical novel.
Pope Innocent III, obsessed with recapturing Jerusalem from Muslim rule and unifying a schismatic church, sees an opportunity to do both: A mysterious and powerful king, Presbyter John, offers to commit his considerable forces to a new round of Crusades, but emissaries must be sent to find him. Cardinal Orisini recommends two men for the job: Brother Mauro, a bookish and borderline-heretical scholar who teaches logic and rhetoric at the new university in Bologna, and Nicolo diCarlo, a young and ambitious Genoese merchant looking to make his mark. (Both characters are memorably drawn in this action-packed drama.) The Pope can’t help wonder what Cardinal Orsini’s angle his—he is a master manipulator, and his “unctuousness and humility mask sinister intent.” Orsini strikes a side deal with Nicolo—anxious to grab his own cut, he encourages him to find the source of the spices so highly prized in Rome, stoking the ambitions of the young man. The Pope reluctantly agrees with Orsini’s recommendations, and the unlikely pair head to Constantinople in search of Presbyter John, but the journey is a perilous one, made more so by Nicolo’s foolhardy imprudence, which is reliably exacerbated by greed, beautiful women, and an excess of drink (“How could he be so stupid and brash? Too much wine”). In this historically rigorous and dramatically absorbing tale, Brother Mauro, the quintessential intellectual, turns out to be surprisingly resourceful, and Nicolo, for all his worldly intelligence, callowly gullible. The author’s writing is consistently clear (if absent sparkling style), and the plot is gripping and brimming with suspense. An inconclusive ending suggests a sequel, one the reader is likely to anticipate enthusiastically.
A captivating adventure filled with both danger and astute theological inquiry.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798888245170
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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