A gripping story, powerfully dramatic as well as historically instructive.
Brouwer’s historical novel imagines of the life of John, the son of Zebedee, the last disciple of Jesus.
In 62 AD, Jerusalem is riven by increasingly violent internecine conflict—Zealots, radical Pharisees and Sadducees, and bloodthirsty Sicarii all vie against each other and their Roman overseers for power. John, the youngest disciple of Jesus, is drawn into the fray when James, the leader of the Christian church in Jerusalem, is murdered by Ananus ben Ananus, a high priest and high-ranking Sadducee. Some radicals pushing for war, like Menahem ben Yehuda of the ultra-violent Sicarii, try to intimidate John into taking up arms. John is caught between the spiritual example of Jesus and the demands of worldly affairs, a tension sensitively evoked by the author: “At what point will I give up all this worldliness, Jesus? Why do I keep striving to change the world when I have not even changed my own heart? When I faced those men today, Lord, I had passionate, powerful thoughts, but my words did not reflect those thoughts. I felt stunted. The life of God within me has stagnated.” Before he died on the cross, Jesus charged John with taking care of his mother, Mary, but she implores John to travel away from Jerusalem and spread the word of her crucified son. Brouwer chooses a fascinating historical protagonist, one ripe for literary appropriation—John was the youngest and last of Jesus’s apostles, and, the author asserts, his gospel “struck the Christian world like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky.” There is little historical documentation of his life after Jesus’ death, a lacuna filled with novelistic opportunity. Brouwer impressively takes advantage of this, composing a tale both inventive and historically rigorous. For Christians and non-Christians alike, this is an engrossing narrative of faith during a time of political tumult.
A gripping story, powerfully dramatic as well as historically instructive.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2022
ISBN: 9798363117671
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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