The kind of dangerous book that makes you want to remove most of your clothing, climb in a dugout and just start paddling.
Rollins tells an epic tale of ancient conflict, migration, spirit-world mystery and love.
The story is set in 12,000 B.C. in the forests and on the grassy steppes of West Africa. From the get-go, Rollins establishes a lovely, haunting tone: “It was the smell that had brought him here, to this village, the complicated, heavy smell of men and women and children.” Naaba is an outcast and a wanderer, and in this village he will find a like soul in Asha, who has a deep affinity for the watery realm, but has so far had her yearnings thwarted. They quit the village and set out to find a home. They move through a world in flux—“There were powerful places in every community: certain hills or lakes or trees that held special energy… but this was different somehow; it was a deliberate manipulation of that power.” These early humans learn that power can be diabolical and that the gods of the proto-myths, once protective, could be just as cruelly fickle, happily killing humans “not for anything they’d done, but only because the gods found it entertaining…. [I]t was a difficult balance, to acknowledge the power of the gods and yet maintain the importance of individual life.” A dynamic tension runs through the quest, a push-pull of forces—cooperative captives, murderous love, surprising intersections of principal players—as Naaba and Asha move forward, still following their noses, through a number of different communities that Rollins draws with detailed color, and the pair gather a cast of characters around them, fashioned with panache by Rollins into breathing entities with unforeseen weaknesses and unexpected strengths. They also learn to sail and ride a hellacious storm to the Antilles. The variety of settings—brutal war scenes, sporting contests, mysterious happenings in sacred places, the spookiness of what lies beneath the ocean’s surface, island biogeography—are meticulously plotted, the language precise but not prim, with an intriguing contrapuntal melody between the cadenced formality of Dashona, the storyteller within the text, and the liquid nature of Rollin’s narrative.
The kind of dangerous book that makes you want to remove most of your clothing, climb in a dugout and just start paddling.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-1453755037
Page Count: 442
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
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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