A historically intriguing investigation that falls flat as a panoramic drama.
A historical novel explores the biblically undocumented years of Jesus’ life.
When Jesus is only 12 years old, his great uncle Joseph of Arimathea—generally referred to as Rama—decides his nephew is ready for a deeper educational experience, one that will chasten his tendency to be “falsely sure of himself.” Rama once studied under the famously wise druids in Britannicum—they have “educated members of the noble and royal families of most of the world”—at Ynys Witrin, a remote place, and he believes Jesus would benefit from the same opportunity. Rama takes him on one of his business trips—he supervises the mining operations all across the Roman Empire—and leaves Jesus under the care of the druids for years. There, he learns Ogham, a hermetic language devised to confound the first Roman conquerors. Saunders tracks the religious relics that are a historical testament to Jesus’ educational experience, including a record of his own thoughts etched in Ogham of extraordinary scriptural experiences: “The lance and the cruets are suggestive, but this skin with Ogham is the equivalent of other Apocrypha; it is a fifth Gospel, the Gospel according to Jesus. As short and direct as it is, it is more powerful and valuable than all the others.” The author also conjures two chronologically disparate subplots. In the 16th century, Abbot Richard Whiting refuses to relinquish the relics to King Henry VIII, who plans to use them to legitimize the establishment of his own church outside of papal authority. Before they can be taken by force, Whiting spirits them to the king of Spain, Carlos I. And in a contemporary narrative thread, Bo Chancellor, a New Orleans lawyer, is unwittingly drawn into the search for the relics and their explosive theological significance.
Saunders’ historical research is as impressively erudite as it is inventive—the highlight of the book is the attempt, more creative than rigorously scholarly, to imagine the lost years of Jesus’ life. In the process, the author also deftly fills in the blanks of Joseph of Arimathea’s existence too, “a virtual unknown in the Bible until the last chapters of the four Gospels.” Still, for all of its intellectual strengths, the ambitious novel struggles as a literary drama—simply too much is crammed into it, and it often reads like a congested history textbook more than a vibrant fictional tale. It doesn’t help that Saunders’ prose inclines to the melodramatic and can be unwieldy. At one point, Whiting’s interrogator clumsily declaims: “Then you shall all three be damned to hades for what you have done and continue to do. For we shall continue our search and, when we find all we need, you shall regret that you did not respond to the most generous offer of leniency from His Majesty. You shall feel the wrath.”
A historically intriguing investigation that falls flat as a panoramic drama.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64559-495-6
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Covenant Books
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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