An engaging novel of ancient Israel with some ungainly writing.
Israelite generals and judges organize their people against the threat of the Canaanites in a novel drawn from biblical history.
Sennett (Nicholas Rowe and the Beginnings of Feminism on the London Stage, 2005) turns to fiction in this novel based on part of the Old Testament. After the village of Beth-Tahor is destroyed in a Canaanite attack, soldiers-turned-farmers Barak and Ramor realize that their only chance for survival is to organize their fellow Israelites into an army that will fight back and end the threat of Sisera, the general who is determined to wipe out the Israelites. Although some of the tribal leaders are reluctant to fight, Deborah, one of the most respected judges of the tribes, organizes a resistance and appoints Barak to lead the army. Barak faces both military and personal setbacks as he becomes a leader with the view: “I do not want to be a savior or general or even private. I only want God to intervene and stop this persecution of His people.” He accepts leadership as his duty, however, and conceives strategy that defeats the larger and more powerful opponent. Sennett presents well-rounded and complex characters, from Deborah and her husband, Lapidoth, who does not object to his wife's leadership role, to Barak and his struggles with confidence and conscience. The battle scenes are fast-paced, giving the reader a sense of the horrors of war without dwelling on excessive violence. At times, the writing is clunky, with too much characterization crammed into a single sentence. (“While she worked her way from hut to hut, Sarah's tears flowed as this twenty-five year old woman with long, dark brown hair that reached her waist recognized the lifeless bodies of her friends and neighbors strewn across the ground like rubbish as she made her way through the devastated streets of what used to be her home town.”) The story also has jarring reminders of its historical setting: “Since there was no police force or basic infrastructure intended for area defense in the thirteenth century BC, each family and village had to provide for its own protection.” Many readers, however, will be willing to overlook the awkward prose as they get caught up in one of the lesser-known episodes of early Jewish history.
An engaging novel of ancient Israel with some ungainly writing.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490818092
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
