Middling.
Goodwin, an acclaimed travel writer and popular historian, now takes on a mystery, with mixed results.
Goodwin’s history of the Ottoman Empire (Lords of the Horizons, 1999) undoubtedly served him well in this first of a planned series of adventures featuring Inspector Yashim Togalu, a eunuch serving the sultan. The Istanbul of 1836 is an exciting blend of old-world tradition and modern innovation, but there are those who would raise a revolution to stop the clock of progress. The general of the New Guard (a modern, French-trained army) asks Yashim to discreetly uncover the whereabouts of four missing soldiers before the Sultan declares an edict of modern political reforms. Yashim has ten days, but the answers, and the soldiers’ bodies, begin to pile up quickly. Soon, Yashim discovers a plot by the Janissaries, believed to be irretrievably disbanded, to stage a coup. For hundreds of years, the religiously mystic Janissaries worked as the Empire’s protectorate, but in the end became corrupt and dangerous, and not only to the sultan but to the citizens of their own city, as they terrorized with fire. Yashim pieces together the clues with the help of his confidant, the Polish ambassador Palieski, and of his longtime friend Preen, a transvestite dancer. Also requiring Yashim’s attention is a private matter at the palace—a girl from the sultan’s harem has been killed, and priceless jewels are missing. Goodwin has the most tantalizing material to work with—the secret lives of harem girls, the sorrow of eunuchs, sufic mysticism, the bustling metropolis of 19th-century Istanbul—but somehow, what should have been conveyed vividly about this mélange of exotica is instead a bit humdrum. After attempts on his life, and an affair with the Russian ambassador’s wife, Yashim uncovers the conspiracy and saves the city. Goodwin’s mystery is subject to the charisma of the detective—whether he is quirky or clever or tough enough—but our Yashim is more enigma than is good for the plot.
Middling.Pub Date: May 16, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-17860-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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
PROFILES
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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