A fascinating evocation of the major players of the Ottoman renaissance.
A captured Venetian encounters a strange blend of civilization and barbarism as she attains the highest rank possible for a woman in the Ottoman Empire.
As Nurbanu, nee Cecilia Baffo Veniero, queen mother and former sultaness, lies dying, she writes down the story of her life. Born of a never-legalized union between a Venetian mapmaking prodigy, Violante, and a nobleman, Cecilia is doted on by her maternal grandfather and studies science with her mother’s teacher, Egnatius. This idyll is interrupted by Violante’s death by drowning. At age 12, Cecilia is sent to live on her father’s fiefdom, Paros island. Shortly thereafter, invading Turks abduct her. Arriving at the harem of the Ottoman emperor, Suleiman the Magnificent, Cecilia, renamed Nurbanu, finds that she has been fast-tracked for success in her new home: apparently her captors are well-aware of her erudition and her ties to the upper echelons of their most intractable foe, Venice. With Suleiman’s blessing, she is schooled alongside the crown prince, Mehmed, with whom she falls in love. When Mehmed is killed by wasps, Suleiman appoints Nurbanu the consort of his next heir, Selim, and although the prince is grossly corpulent and a drunkard, affection grows between them. When she gives birth to a son, Murad, she is promoted to wife and endowed with a huge fortune. When death ends Suleiman’s 46-year reign, Selim becomes sultan, and Nurbanu, now sultaness, is embroiled in the Ottoman dynasty’s ruthless method of ensuring orderly succession: brothers and half brothers of the heir apparent must be killed, a rule complicated by the existence of harems. Suleiman had commanded Nurbanu to make sure Murad would go unchallenged; thus when Selim starts impregnating concubines, it is her job to eliminate any male children. The resulting moral quandary still plagues Nurbanu on her deathbed. Although Nurbanu is portrayed as a strong woman, the constraints of her milieu rob her of true choice, which renders her struggles less compelling and the plot less suspenseful. However, Hughes marshals her extensive research well, mining the known facts for sensory details that never fail to engage.
A fascinating evocation of the major players of the Ottoman renaissance.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-88-328570-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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