A subtly handled story of a saint’s life that offers some useful insights into both the era and the woman.
Loranger’s (The Odyssey of Art O’Hara, 2012) historical novel tells the tale of Mary, an Egyptian prostitute during the late Roman Empire who repents and becomes a Christian saint.
As a youth, Mary often dreams of a man named Charaxus, who her mother says is imaginary but whom her father describes as her guardian angel. Charaxus convinces Mary to leave home when she’s 12; she goes to Alexandria, where she’s soon working for a madam, Lady Danae. Seventeen years later, Mary is living with a rich man named Nobilius as his personal prostitute. He asks her to marry him but she declines; after the second rebuff, he commits suicide by hurling himself off the famous lighthouse at Pharos. Mary then joins a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, paying for her sea passage by providing her services to members of the crew. Onboard, she meets a man who looks like Charaxus, and they become lovers. In Jerusalem, Mary tries to enter the Great Church, which purportedly sits atop Jesus’ burial place, but some unseen force keeps her from going in. Then she hears the songs of an elderly flautist and finds that she can finally enter. She decides to devote her life to Jesus and crosses the Jordan River to live in the wilderness as a hermit. Charaxus shows up in her cave and argues against her religion, but Mary resists him. Years later, Mary meets a monk named Zosimus and tells him her story. Overall, this is a tightly written account of the life of an obscure saint, and it spins a credible yarn of what life might have been like in her time and place. Although the book contains many sexual interludes, they are rather chaste—perhaps too chaste for modern readers. Some lyrical passages hint at the beauty of the Bible, as when the flautist declares that “all mankind is grass.” But Mary’s motivations aren’t always entirely clear—especially those that led her to her ultimate conversion. She talks of doing “penance” for the “joys of sex,” but some readers may wonder whether Mary has truly changed her ways because of a deep religious revelation.
A subtly handled story of a saint’s life that offers some useful insights into both the era and the woman.Pub Date: July 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-8940-7
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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