A historically exceptional tale with some uneven dramatic elements.
A historical novel set in the 11th century chronicles the plight of Roman Catholic Armenians under siege by warring Turks.
In 1064, Arman Chakalian’s home in Ani—located in Turkey, on the Armenian border—is overrun by Turkish soldiers. Arman is Armenian and his father is killed in the invasion. Because Arman’s mother died in childbirth, he is left all alone. He manages to escape Ani with his best friend, Tovmas Valenian, and they decide to travel to Cilicia to find Arman’s grandparents. Then they discover that both of them are dead. The duo resolves to join the Byzantine army as mercenaries in order to fight the Turks, though Tovmas longs to return home to see whether his parents are still alive. Tovmas is entrusted with an ancient religious relic, the Cross of Noah, and asked to secretly shuttle it to Constantinople, where it can be safeguarded until a new Armenian state is established. Both friends travel to Constantinople by sea, and Arman is asked to safely transport Erica, a beautiful young girl, back to her father. He saves her from a vicious attack by a lecherous sailor, and the two fall in love. But they are briefly captured and made slaves by pirates in Cairo. Later, Arman and Tovmas fight courageously against the Turks. Tovmas finally returns home to convince his parents to leave Ani—now under the oppressive thumb of a Turkish ruler—and move to Cilicia, where they can safely begin a new life. Arman marries Erica, but feels shiftless in her native town, Sredets, and the two separate painfully. He pledges to return to Constantinople and rejoin what increasingly seems like a lost cause, defending not only Armenian independence, but also the continued existence of Christianity. Knott (Beyond the Bitter Sea, 2014) masterfully captures the historical period, and the perilous circumstances into which Armenian Christians were forced. His research is as painstaking as it is wide-ranging—he displays an expert grasp of the era’s political struggles and religious divisions as well as the ancient geography and economy. The principal selling point of the novel is its epochal authenticity—it is hard to imagine an academic treatise providing as full and vivid a picture of the time. In addition, Arman is drawn with fine, nuanced authorial strokes. The character expresses not only the rage Armenians must have felt in the face of their ruthless debasement, but also an ambivalence many had about the religious crusade birthed in response to it, capable of its own merciless savagery: “ ‘I question the morality of this war,’ said Arman. ‘Already it seems that the crusaders are only interested in plunder and killing innocent Jews and even other Christians who fall in their path.’ ” But the plot moves lethargically and has a tendency to meander without narrative discipline. In addition, the story’s dramatic facets aren’t always as persuasive as its historical ones. For example, Arman recovers far too quickly and fully from a personal tragedy to be emotionally believable.
A historically exceptional tale with some uneven dramatic elements.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 349
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
