A bit like an exotic medieval mashup of War and Peace and Oliver Twist.
Spanish novelist Giner relates the adventures of Diego de Malagón, a young albéitar, or veterinarian, during the Spanish peninsula’s conflict-wracked 13th century.
Albéitar is the "noblest of professions" and is especially a healer of horses, those animals being central to medieval chivalry. Diego loved horses, especially his Arabian mare, Sabba, but he had no ambition to be an albéitar until Saracens attacked his father’s inn. Father dead and sisters captured, Diego was left to fend for himself and to seek revenge. In Toledo, Diego earned tutelage under Galib, a mudajjan—free Muslim—who suggested, "[y]our enemy is not Muslims, Diego, it is the Almohads." As he learns the albéitar’s art, Diego is sidetracked by Benazir, Galib’s beautiful Persian wife, who attempts to seduce him. Forced to flee Toledo, Diego’s adventures continue across Spain—be aware many place names are from the 1200s—ending when Alfonso VIII of Castile names him a knight albéitar for the Three Kingdoms. Along the way, Diego humbles himself while learning more about horses at a Cistercian monastery, falls in love with Mencía, a beautiful young noblewoman, befriends Marcos, petty thief and Lothario, who betrays him at a crucial juncture, faces the gallows convicted of satanic magic because he discovered the source of an epidemic, undertakes dangerous missions to free Al-Andalus from the Moors and plays a role in the Almohad caliph’s defeat at the epic Battle of the Navas de Tolosa. Other than Diego, Giner’s characters are static. His writing relies on exposition, heavily detailed—albeit little about life’s practicalities, like food—and it employs straightforward rather than literary language. Battle scenes are framed rather than detailed, but Giner’s historical references reflect intriguing research.
A bit like an exotic medieval mashup of War and Peace and Oliver Twist.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9755-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Grupo Planeta
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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