Historical fiction strives to restore the virtue of La Malinche, the infamous slave and confidante of Hernán Cortés, through an intimate coming-of-age tale.
At the beginning of the 16th century, the peoples of Latin America faced massive upheaval as Spanish conquistadors arrived to spread Christianity and claim the land’s fortune for themselves. The most noteworthy of these conquistadors was legendary Hernán Cortés, a man of many resources, though perhaps none greater than the multilingual slave and recent convert Marina. With her aid and council, Cortés and his fellow Spaniards were able to ally themselves with the Tlaxcalans to defeat the Aztecs; and with her love, Cortés fathered one of the first mestizos, a child of both European and Latin American descent. But before she was Marina, she was Malinalli, a Nahua girl from a well-to-do family, who, by the machinations of self-serving men, was sold into slavery. Only through her inquisitive spirit was she able overcome her hardships and learn the skills that made her invaluable to Cortés, establishing her as one of the most important—and often maligned—women in Mexican history. Heavily researched, Gordon’s (Voice of the Vanquished, 1995, etc.) narrative tackles Marina’s story with a distinctly contemporary voice, modernizing even the dialogue to make it both relevant and approachable and to more easily parallel present-day topics such as politics, family values, religion and gender roles. Despite this modernization, the tale doesn’t neglect the bygone cultures it portrays; instead, it highlights the nuances of the unique people, customs and languages Marina encounters. Though strong overall, the narrative has a few flaws: Some character developments feel rushed, especially Malinalli’s quick acceptance of Christianity, where perhaps complex emotion has been sacrificed for historical accuracy. Similarly, the text seems so intent on restoring honor to Marina that it greatly simplifies the struggle between her birth culture and the invading Spaniards’, which is particularly noticeable in the narrative’s less than robust criticism of colonialism. In Malinalli’s story, spiritual omens, Christian or otherwise, often feel Shakespearean in nature—befitting of the story’s emphasis on the joy and tragedy in the life of the controversial “mother of the new Mexican people.”
Emotionally dry, but historical fiction doesn’t get much better.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462064953
Page Count: 672
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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