A gripping, if thin, alternate history narrative with a rebellious Jesus.
A historical novel offers a very different Jesus from the one in the New Testament.
Schwartz’s Jesus narrates the story himself and opens it with a volley of stunning revelations. Jesus of Gennesareth refers to himself as the Hasmonean king of Israel, holed up in the mountain fortress of Masada in C.E. 73 as the place is besieged by Romans. He’s almost 80 years old, and his crucifixion half a century earlier gave rise to the story of Jesus of Nazareth—a tale that was subsequently enlarged into the familiar New Testament narrative. This text hid the fact that the true son of God was alive and well. Having leveled these bombshells, this Jesus then tells his story, starting with attending a bar mitzvah and learning that his cousin John, son of Zacharias, was the Hasmonean king. Jesus also discovers that the title will come to him on his relative’s death. In the pages that follow, the author retells the traditional story—the disciples, Mary Magdalene, the clashes with the Romans, and so on—from a radically different perspective. This culminates in an imaginative version of the crucifixion in which Schwartz deftly shows how Jesus is secretly drugged unconscious and taken down alive in order to heal and escape with his wife and disciples. Throughout, the author presents readers with an intriguing protagonist. This Jesus fervently believes in his own lessons of peace and tolerance. He hopes to continue preaching even while the legend of Jesus of Nazareth steadily grows, expanding to include outlandish miracle stories and claims of a virgin birth. Jesus of Gennesareth is dismayed by all this: “I was amazed that pagans would require such strange things to believe the messages I had taught.” Unfortunately, he quickly finds himself back in conflict with the Romans, stuck in Masada with a society of his faithful plus a core of Jewish zealots, all of whom are doomed to die when the siege succeeds. Schwartz tells this riveting story clearly and succinctly but with a paucity of rich details. Many of his readers will doubtless be wishing the inventive tale had a great deal more specifics and complexity.
A gripping, if thin, alternate history narrative with a rebellious Jesus.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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