This vibrant adventure exploring a bygone era offers both stunning and mundane scenes.
A seafaring slave faces pirates and other dangers in this third installment of a historical fiction series set in ancient Greece.
It is 430 B.C. and a young man named Arion finds himself in a perilous situation. He is an oar-rowing slave onboard a merchant ship that is hastily pursued by pirates. An Athenian triaconter is near his ship but there is no telling whether it will be able to help before the pirates inflict their damage. In the violence and ship ramming that ensues, Arion is wounded, though he performs his duties bravely. The pirates are deflected; their captain is executed; and Arion is granted “freedom from fetters” upon returning to shore. Arion is still a slave, albeit one that has risen greatly in the eyes of his master, Artontes. Another person who takes notice of Arion is Artontes’ wife, Melissa. She would like nothing more than a sexual relationship with Arion but the young hero is hesitant. It is a tough time for love with a plague taking many lives in Athens and the unfolding Peloponnesian War set to claim more. It is not long before Arion is back at his oar en route to the Gulf of Corinth to engage in more maritime action. Information about the ancient world is interspersed at every corner in this chain of events. At one point, Arion takes a long stroll to the Parthenon, where the “aura of its architectural artistry envelops him.” While such portions certainly fail to accelerate the plot, they give the reader a more thorough sense of the magnificence of the time period. But other interactions, usually between two characters, tend to slow the book’s progress without providing much in return. A description of Melissa and Arion conversing unhelpfully asserts: “When she sees or senses his hesitation, she gives him long enough to absorb what she is saying, but watches that she may continue before he is ready to speak.” Sten’s (Return to Lesbos, 2017, etc.) story nevertheless delivers a glimpse of ancient Greece’s many facets. Arion’s journey helps to paint a vivid image of the past, whether exploring the complex rules governing slaves or presenting the details of striking monuments.
This vibrant adventure exploring a bygone era offers both stunning and mundane scenes.Pub Date: June 25, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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