A capable historical novel with an unexpected premise that’s likely to engage readers interested in its time period.
In this debut historical novel set in the early 1500s, two Spaniards shipwrecked in the New World follow drastically different paths as they gradually become part of the Mayan culture.
The novel opens with a group of Spanish explorers adrift in a lifeboat, their ship having foundered on the reefs off the New World. Eventually, their boat finds land in Mexico’s Yucatan, where the native Mayans swiftly imprison them. Of the 13 survivors, only the young soldier Gonzalo Guerrero and the Dominican priest Jeronimo Aguilar last very long amid privation and slavery. The characters offer a stark contrast: Gonzalo, the novel’s protagonist, is headstrong and resists his imprisonment, while Jeronimo dutifully serves his new masters in the hope that his hard work might set a Christian example and thus convert some of the “heathens.” Both escape their initial captors and fall in with another group of Mayans. Gonzalo eventually proves himself a worthy warrior when the group is attacked, and he soon moves up the ranks. He eventually finds himself in a position of some importance and marries Ix Zazil, the daughter of his master, Nachan Caan. Jeronimo remains subservient and is constantly appalled by his captors’ un-Christian actions, but he too eventually progresses, becoming a servant to one of the Mayan chiefs. Robbins adeptly presents unusual (and to modern audiences, horrifying) aspects of Mayan culture. A particularly memorable passage involves Gonzalo mutilating his genitals as a sacrifice to the gods—and, more importantly, as an effort to fit in with his fellow soldiers. His storyline is clearly the more engaging of the two; too often, Jeronimo merely does what readers might expect instead of exhibiting more agency. Still, Robbins is an able plotter, and the eventual meeting between Jeronimo and Gonzalo (now tattooed and pierced and looking very much the Mayan) lends some emotional heft to the story.
A capable historical novel with an unexpected premise that’s likely to engage readers interested in its time period.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500892562
Page Count: 344
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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