A vivid and insightful portrayal of the turbulent times that produced a remarkable writer.
A historical novel centers on a brilliant African storyteller who is a creator of the Bible.
Sent away from her uncle and aunt’s ranch near Saba, Arabia, to live with her father in Jerusalem, 8-year-old Keb jumps ship. Encountering a priest, she learns to write her name in an Egyptian cartouche, but is dragged back onboard the vessel and whipped. Though her father is King Solomon, presiding over Judah and Israel, Keb is illegitimate, mocked for being dark skinned and having a “burnt face.” She persuades her new tutor, Talus, to teach her to read multiple languages and write, though such skills are reserved for men. But her life is lonely, and Keb’s excited to marry a scribe, Raddai. When they fail to have children, Raddai takes a second wife. After Keb finally bears a son, her husband is appalled by the baby’s black skin. Keb’s life shifts after buying a papyrus roll, an inkwell, and a reed from a trader. Attempting to understand Yahweh’s actions in the world, she writes a powerful narrative. Raddai takes the credit for finding Keb’s document, The Chronicles of Moses. While the priests believe Moses is the scroll’s author, Keb sees the rapture her words spark when read aloud at an important festival. Many adventures follow; Keb becomes close to a slave, Cimon. Then there’s a battle for succession after Solomon’s death, and Keb’s storytelling may become necessary again. Musen skillfully creates a nuanced portrait of life in ancient times. There’s brutality; children get sacrificed to the gods while women constantly fend off potential rapists (even Solomon makes unwanted advances). Yet strangers host Keb in their homes while she travels. Readers learn about the era’s cuisine, including goat, fig, and olive stew. In addition, the novel offers memorable, multifaceted characters. Pi, a handsome bowman, teaches young Keb about Egypt before betraying her. Solomon and Raddai also alternate kindness (gifts of lion earrings and a harp from the king, bronze bracelets from the scribe) with mental cruelty. “If only men could be satisfied with a good day of tilling—that they can’t is why the world is as it is,” Keb muses. But these haunting experiences ultimately become fodder for her art.
A vivid and insightful portrayal of the turbulent times that produced a remarkable writer.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781610530545
Page Count: 409
Publisher: Blackbird Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2025
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 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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