A well-researched rags-to-riches tale that’s told with confidence and enthusiasm.
Burton’s debut historical novel, the first in a series about the Byzantine Empress Theodora, charts her journey from destitution to the throne.
The novel opens in Constantinople in the year 512. A rebellion is brewing in the city, and 14-year-old Theodora, along with her sister, Comito, is searching for their father, a bear-keeper named Acacius. The following morning, the siblings tragically discover that he has been killed in the unrest. Magister Origen, a local judge, suggests that their mother, Maximina, marry Samuel, a candidate for the bear-keeper post, in order to keep the profession in her family. Maximina agrees to this course of action, but she puts her foot down when the magistrate also recommends that both of her daughters be sent to dance school, where they’ll learn how to entertain men as actresses—and as courtesans. Despite her mother’s protests, Theodora agrees to attend the school, declaring that she wants to be “on stage for all to see. Someone beautiful and important.” Theodora goes on to fall in love with the Hippodrome and theater life in general. This idyllic existence ends, however, when Magister Origen rapes her, and one night, she slashes him with a knife and flees for home. The magistrate then withdraws financial support for the family, and soon they face dire poverty. Their savior comes in the form of a handsome Roman officer who’s later revealed to be an important figure. He asks 19-year-old Theodora to work for him as a spy to get information from various men in power, by whatever means necessary. However, she later finds that she’s falling deeply in love with her new employer. Over the course of this novel, Burton offers an elegantly written historical tale in which he effortlessly weaves sweeping emotion and fine detail into compact sentences: “Maximina pulled her daughters in closer, forming a protective embrace. Theodora saw how the white gowns spilled down like milk upon the dark brown of the track, her mother rising above.” He also smoothly supplies accurate historical details as the story goes on, as when the aforementioned Roman officer gently corrects Theodora regarding the identity and occupation of his powerful adoptive father: “But yes, he’s Count of the Excubitors.” However, the author also sometimes offers occasional moments of physical description that can be a bit off-putting, as when he notes that “Theodora rubbed her teeth against her bottom lip.” British author Stella Duffy’s 2010 novel Theodora, which deals with the same main character, is far more brazen in its depictions of sex scenes than Burton’s is, although some readers will likely prefer the latter’s relatively genteel approach, which mostly veers away from sensationalism and focuses more on characterization. Theodora, in particular, is revealed to be a charming and strong-willed yet emotionally conflicted young woman, and she engagingly endeavors to exert her influence in a male-dominated society. The overall storyline is generally strong and compelling, and the writing is, for the most part, sharp and learned.
A well-researched rags-to-riches tale that’s told with confidence and enthusiasm.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73302-210-1
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Silent Music Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
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