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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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