Slow-paced in the first part, the novel nevertheless provides plenty of action scenes and enticing details.
From Sten (Mine, 2010) comes a historical novel concerning a boy named Arion and his adventures in the ancient world.
It is 439 B.C.E. when Arion, a Greek boy of 12, sets sail from Mytilene with his merchant father, Periandros. Heading south across the Aegean Sea, their vessel passes islands such as Chios and Samos, allowing father and son the opportunity to reflect on The Odyssey. Such is the case when the two pass ships off of Samos (“Arion remembers that Homer compares to a quadriga the fifty-two-oared Phaiakian galley that carried Odysseus homeward from Scheria Island”). Nothing, however, can compare to the excitement of Egypt (“Unlike any other land on earth, Egypt is a surprise, an intoxicating dichotomy, a verdant plain eight to sixteen kilometers wide and nine hundred seventy kilometers long, watered and nurtured by a river that is usually more than a kilometer wide, in the midst of one of earth’s most inhospitable regions—the driest, nearly hottest, desert”). After taking in many of the sites of this alluring land, the eager travelers find that fate becomes grossly less kind. During celebrations for Arion’s 13th birthday, a group of marauders attacks with deadly consequences. What will it mean for Arion’s future when his world is so suddenly, and brutally, shattered? Taking quite a few pages to get to that event, the book does not always deliver the most gripping prose. One example arrives in a description of how Arion and his father become tired when finishing their evening meal: “After an empty stomach is satisfied, and night falls, though sleep is resisted by an active mind and imagination, the body demands it, and the two deck lamps are too dim to resist the darkness.” Items of the ancient world are, however, explained in efficient fashion, including the symbolic importance of scarabs to the Egyptians: “So often in Egypt one can see myriad baby beetles emerge like magic from a ball of dung….It is life from nothing, life from muck!” These sentiments, combined with the violent second half of the story, create a complex image of the period that is vibrant with mythmaking but also seared by the constant possibility of terror.
Slow-paced in the first part, the novel nevertheless provides plenty of action scenes and enticing details.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5118-0154-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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