Whether interested in the history of the Middle Ages or just looking for a thrilling tale of knights, warfare, romance, and...
Prepare to have your buckles swashed: in the tradition of Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, this historical fiction depicts the people and events leading to the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
Damsels, Druids, Kelts, Vikings, mysterious knights-errant, jousts, mighty steeds, and chivalry are all part of this thoroughly enjoyable, well-written historical novel. Vint (The Brothers Reno, 2014, etc.) breathes life into history with beautifully drawn characters and nonstop action. Readers first meet Harold Godwinson, in line for the Anglish (English) crown when he survives a shipwreck and is taken for ransom by Count Guy from Normandy. Guy’s cousin is William the Conqueror, a man who trusts no one, particularly relatives. After William relieves Guy of Harold, a medieval bromance ensues in which William learns to trust and Harold, who until then was a womanizing, carousing loner, falls for William’s daughter, Adelize. As friendship grows between the two nobles and love blossoms between Harold and Adelize, William offers to build a castle for the lovers, but Harold wonders if he is truly a guest or just a pampered prisoner. Before leaving for England, Harold is tricked into taking a loyalty oath to William. On returning home, Harold is chosen by the dying King Edward to be the next king, despite Harold’s son Tostig being next in line. Meanwhile, William feels betrayed by Harold and plots his invasion. Tostig, who escapes after an unsuccessful attempt on Harold’s life, tries first to side with William, then with Haarald Hardrada, the Viking king of Norway, and the rest, quite literally, is history. The final Battle of Hastings scene is long, detailed, and exciting, with pageantlike sideshows of personal duels and jousts. Well-rounded, detailed characterizations of the main players are offset somewhat by the bad guys like Tostig, who tend to be sniveling, traitorous foils.
Whether interested in the history of the Middle Ages or just looking for a thrilling tale of knights, warfare, romance, and intrigue, readers can’t go wrong with this one.Pub Date: April 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5075-2413-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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