An intriguing and colorful retelling that incandescently illuminates and interprets an old story. In the tradition of Anita...
A riveting debut tale of the rise of King David also provides a feminist application of The Prince, as Queen Michal must learn Machiavellian guile and statecraft to survive.
Edghill’s David sounds remarkably like a modern politician: he’s talented—composing all those psalms—self-absorbed, charming, desirous of being popular, but also ruthless when thwarted. The slaying of Goliath, the friendship with Jonathan, and the making of Jerusalem as the capital are not so much a divine plan as the cold calculations of political ambition. Michal, who narrates, is King Saul’s daughter—a beauty who, as an adolescent, falls in love when her brother Jonathan brings David home. Saul reluctantly agrees to her marriage, but on the wedding night David, already anointed king by the Prophet Samuel though Saul is still alive, flees the palace with Michal’s help, warned that his life is in danger. Saul, angered by David’s betrayal, insists that Michal marry widower Phaltiel and live in his village. Initially determined never to forget David, Michal soon loves the gentle Phaltiel, but after David and his army slay Saul as well as Jonathan and occupy Jerusalem, he forces Michal to return as his queen. She relates her grieving return to the palace, where she is kept a pampered prisoner with jewels and gorgeous clothes but no freedom. Observing David closely, though, she takes his measure and resolves to survive. And she does, skillfully, as David’s other wives quarrel, Phaltiel is murdered, and ambitious princes like Absalom challenge David for the throne. Lonely, Michal befriends Bathsheba, saves her from death when her pregnancy is discovered, and helps her raise the wise and loving Solomon, whom Michal is determined will be David’s successor.
An intriguing and colorful retelling that incandescently illuminates and interprets an old story. In the tradition of Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent—and as good.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28918-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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