by Faith L. Justice ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 24, 2020
A gripping tale of a royal sister’s fraught political machinations.
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In this historical novel set in fifth-century Constantinople, a young princess struggles to defend the Eastern Roman Empire after her father’s death.
When the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, Flavius Arcadius Augustus, suddenly dies at the age of 31, a dire crisis of succession presents itself. He left behind three daughters and only one son, Theodosius, who is only 7 years old. The predicament is a perilous one—the Western Empire is under siege by enemies, and “dour-faced” Arcadius’ rule was generally regarded as “disastrous.” In addition, there are persistent rumors that Theodosius is an illegitimate heir to the throne—his mother, Eudoxia, now dead, wasn’t known for her virtue. Pulcheria, Theodosius’ 9-year-old sister, though, is as remarkably precocious as she is protective of her little brother and is anxious to secure both the Eastern Empire and her family’s rule over it. As a girl, she’s barred from ever ruling herself, but she establishes herself as her brother’s closest adviser, asserting an indirect power by way of her influence over him. Anthemius, the second most powerful figure in the Eastern Empire, is appointed regent until Theodosius reaches the age of majority and plans to achieve his own foothold by marrying his rash grandson, Isidorus, to Pulcheria. In this sequel to Twilight Empress (2017), Justice chronicles, with a skillful blend of historical rigor and dramatic action, the extraordinary efforts of Pulcheria to outmaneuver her adversaries and defend Theodosius. The prose is razor sharp, and the tale is as impressively unsentimental as it is genuinely moving: “The one history lesson she learned over and over again was that the emperor was always in danger. That knowledge was a curse. As she had after her mother’s death, Pulcheria struggled with a sense of helplessness. She was a young girl with an impossible task.”
A gripping tale of a royal sister’s fraught political machinations.Pub Date: May 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-917053-23-8
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Raggedy Moon Books
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Allison Pataki ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024
The author never finds her subject in this mostly lackluster account of a memorable literary figure.
A fictionalized take on the trailblazing life of 19th-century feminist Margaret Fuller.
Much has been written about Fuller, including a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography published in 2014. But Pataki believes Fuller still hasn’t gotten her due—especially in comparison to her male contemporaries. Hence this novel, which begins in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1836, when the 26-year-old Margaret—home-schooled by her father and highly educated for a woman of her time—first visits Ralph Waldo Emerson. Waldo, as he was known, becomes her great mentor and friend, and soon Margaret is keeping company with the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In this telling, Emerson and Hawthorne are wildly attracted to her—Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is thought to have been inspired by Fuller—but remain tied to their traditional wives. Though not exactly lonely, Margaret, who narrates her story, is portrayed as a woman alone, struggling with financial woes. Yet soon enough she is making a name for herself, leading groundbreaking conversation groups for women; editing The Dial, journal of the Transcendentalists; writing books; and working for social reform. After she signs on as a journalist for the New-York Tribune, editor Horace Greeley sends her to report from Europe as the first female foreign correspondent. Margaret eventually arrives in Italy to cover the country’s fight for independence and begins an affair with a Roman soldier, Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she has a baby. Despite these dramatic events, much of the novel is earnest and tame, the opposite of a page-turner. There’s a lot of clumsy exposition and literary name-dropping, with dialogue nowhere near as lively as the characters speaking it.
The author never finds her subject in this mostly lackluster account of a memorable literary figure.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593600238
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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by Allison Pataki and Owen Pataki
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2021
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
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The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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