The first of two volumes. One hopes Shaara will take more time with its successor, and produce a novel that compares more...
A disappointing chronicle of the beginnings (1770–76) of the American Revolutionary War: the fourth blockbuster historical in only five years from the hard-working author of Gods and Generals (1996), The Last Full Measure (1998), and Gone for Soldiers (2000).
There’s considerable evidence that Shaara (who began his career by completing the Civil War trilogy initiated by his late father Michael’s The Killer Angels) may be burning himself out. The lengthy prologue here, for example, is marred by astonishing verbal inaccuracies (such as the misuse of “flare” for “flair”) and ungrammatical sentences—the kinds of errors that crop up intermittently thereafter. More damaging are Shaara’s by-the-numbers summaries of all the relevant major events: the Boston Massacre and Tea Party, meetings of the first two Continental Congresses, Paul Revere’s ride, the battles of Lexington and Bunker (actually Breed’s) Hill, George Washington’s military command, the publication of Thomas Paine’s pugnacious manifesto Common Sense, and Congress’s approval of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. All these are narrated as they’re experienced and/or discussed by the primary characters: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, British General Thomas Gage—and, to a lesser extent, universally despised colonial governor (of Massachusetts) Thomas Hutchinson. With the single exception of Franklin (whose unusual personality, compounded of unpretentious sagacity and epicurean sensuality, is nicely captured), they’re all so burdened by the task of providing the reader with huge dollops of sedulously digested information that Shaara neglects to give them any individual reality. Rise to Rebellion is by no means disgraceful; it’s simply dull—especially when compared with such vividly interesting fictional treatments of our early history as almost any of Kenneth Roberts’s novels.
The first of two volumes. One hopes Shaara will take more time with its successor, and produce a novel that compares more favorably with the best of its predecessors.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-42753-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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
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
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