Gillespie provides yet another invincible female heroine in Auriane’s daughter Avenahar—look for her apotheosis in the next...
The sequel to Gillespie’s elaborate Roman epic featuring proud warrior Auriane (The Light Bearer, 1994) finds the now middle-aged woman on the verge of retirement while comfortably ensconced in her lover Marcus Julianus’s estate with two daughters.
It is a.d. 105, and Emperor Trajan rules over an uneasy conglomerate of nations in the Roman Empire. At the imperial border of Germany, where the ancient rivers Mosella and Rhenus meet, the Chattian chieftain's daughter Auriane has lived in romantic accord for seven years with Marcus Julianus, the revered, aristocratic Roman official and father of her nine-year-old daughter, Arria. Secretly, however, Auriane has been involved in a dangerous smuggling operation for her ragtag guerrilla tribe, the Chattians, and is torn between her love for Marcus and her desire to help her people in their ongoing insurrection against Rome. And her fearless, hot-headed 13-year-old daughter, Avenahar—whose father, a Roman slave, Auriane was involved with during a time she'd rather forget—is determined to become a warrior like her mother. When her father's fighting companion Witgern, leader of the Chattian Wolf Coats, seeks out Auriane to help them, Auriane refuses out of love for Marcus and her children, yet she is forced to flee anyway (with Avenahar quick at her side) once the Romans find out she is the fugitive smuggler. Gillespie is an engaging, credible narrator of these far-flung events, and delights especially in the details of Avenahar's womanhood ceremony, enacted deep in the ancestral Holy Wood in the presence of numerous elderwomen and sorceresses. When Avenahar bolts at the news of who her father really is, Auriane sets off to find her and with Marcus's help enlists the might of the Roman army, although our feminist warrior is fed up with this senseless violence and vows to spend her last years as a seer.
Gillespie provides yet another invincible female heroine in Auriane’s daughter Avenahar—look for her apotheosis in the next installment.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-425-21268-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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