An inventive—and highly believable—biblical revisionist tale.
A mystery novel tells the story of an early female Christian leader whose history was erased.
Three women across two millennia challenge the official story of the Roman Catholic Church. The first is Julia Lucinia, a first-century Roman noblewoman trapped in a difficult marriage to an ambitious man. She befriends a kind servant, who introduces her to a strange temple-less sect run by a man named Paul: “He talks of one God, like the Jews do, Julia thought. And he speaks that everyone is equal in this one God’s eyes, whether fine man or slave. He honors women as well as men, seats masters and slaves together without respect to their rank.” Meanwhile, in the 21st century, two women are given access to the Vatican Library. Archaeologists Valentina Vella and Erika Simone discover a “strange” letter that appears to have originally been written by a female bishop: Julia Episcopa. The two are experts on Lucinia, whose trove of early Christian documents was preserved in the ruins of Herculaneum. But could this ancient Christian woman have, in fact, been something unknown to history: a female bishop? In both timelines, the truth of early Christianity will prove something the powers that be would rather keep hidden. In their series opener, Rigoli (Julia Episcopa: A Woman’s Struggle in the Church, 2012) and debut author Cummings write sharp prose, keeping the pace quick and the tensions high. The story is full of amusing bits of invented historical facts and encounters with famous names. Here Lucinia describes her first impression of Paul: “He is far from attractive, she thought. Yet there is something about him. Yes, he is appealing in an odd way.” The novel begs comparisons to Dan Brown, but The Da Vinci Code–like twists are actually rare. Rather than building toward the revelation of a mystery, the book is the story of a coverup and its discovery. The authors go right to the heart of one of the great unknowns of Christian history: the role of women in the early church. The journey is ultimately more thoughtful and satisfying than a mere holy grail.
An inventive—and highly believable—biblical revisionist tale.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-983772-52-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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