A fitting conclusion to a series of historical novels set in pre-contact Micronesia.
A vengeful orphan seeks to rid his homeland of a cannibalistic despot in Knight’s historical novel, the final volume in a series.
Just off the island of Pohnpei rises the greatest architectural feat in all Micronesia: the “stone village” of Nahn Madol, a city of canals and artificial islets built of basalt crystals. For centuries, the city has been ruled by the Saudeleurs—dynastic kings of Pohnpei—but by the early 17th century, things have started to change for the worse. The reigning Saudeleur has just initiated a new law allowing cannibalism as a form of capital punishment. Ijokelekel, a fatherless boy raised to believe he was sired by a thunder god, flees the island in a stolen boat following the murder of his priestess mother. He hopes to find the legendary Ḷainjin, a foreigner who once visited the island, to convince him to come back and challenge the rule of the Saudeleur. He believes that having a divine father must mean that some great destiny is before him, even if he suffers from a general lack of experience. Ijokelekel survives storms, the open ocean, and the disputes of various island clans he meets along the way, eventually making it to Lae Atoll, where Ḷainjin lives. He immediately falls in love with Ḷainjin’s daughter, Kāmeto, and so he asks Ḷainjin for two things: help in bringing down the Saudeleur, and Kāmeto’s hand in marriage. Ḷainjin, for reasons he keeps to himself, refuses both of Ijokelekel’s requests, but when Ijokelekel and Kāmeto leave the island anyway, intent on launching a rebellion against the Saudeleur with other allies, Ḷainjin has no choice but to follow along and prevent his child from getting killed in the fray. Though it may indeed be Ijokelekel’s destiny to change the course of his home island’s history, it may not be his destiny to survive the encounter.
Knight’s prose glitters with Micronesian words, each explained in the book’s comprehensive glossary. While the terminology and familial relationships are at first difficult to parse, they help the reader acclimate to the rhythms of the setting: “Ijokelekel and Kāmeto planned their adolescent destinies, and thus, they strode hand in hand up to her mother’s house as her brother-cousin gathered a group that first carried the kapwor shell with a pole and then carried the proas and beached them on the strand.” The author isn’t afraid to make his readers work a little bit—seemingly 80 percent of the characters have names that start with the letter L—for the sake of achieving verisimilitude. As in the previous books of the series, the novel has an almost Homeric feel as it features small boats on long voyages, encounters with new peoples and customs, and stories of brutal battles and myths told at length around campfires. Knight forsakes some of the urgency of modern storytelling to set the mood for this far-off world, but that is hardly a bad thing (by this point in the series, readers will have decided what they think of Knight’s storytelling style). The book makes for a satisfyingly epic capstone for an ambitious and highly immersive cycle of historical fiction.
A fitting conclusion to a series of historical novels set in pre-contact Micronesia.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-1771806350
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Iguana Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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