Alive with the difficulties of an ancient era, this Greek sailing adventure remains hampered by portions of overexplanation.
A young man with a mission must travel to the island of Lesbos in volume four of a historical fiction series set in ancient Greece.
It is August 427 B.C. and a man named Arion finds himself in a precarious situation. Arion owes money to an unpleasant individual known as Smerdis and he has only eight days to repay his debt. The stakes are high for Arion, as failure on his part will end in his own enslavement. His only hope lies in sailing to the city of Mytilene (on Lesbos), where he will attempt to save his family estate from his treacherous Uncle Erxandros. Meanwhile, the Peloponnesian War is under way and the Athenian empire has just finished suppressing a revolt in, as it just so happens, Mytilene. Initially, the Athenians would like to put to death every man in Mytilene and sell all of the women and children into slavery. Athenian hearts soften, however, and the harsh orders are revoked. The only problem is that a ship has already been sent to carry out the orders. The Athenians must now send a faster vessel if the people of Mytilene are to be spared. Luckily for Arion, he is not only headed in that direction, but he is also a powerful oarsman. After obtaining a rowing position on the ship carrying the rescindment order, he has quite the set of tasks ahead of him. Fortunately, Arion’s duties are ones that manage to make excellent use of the time period that the story portrays. The threat of enslavement and massacres were, after all, not alien concepts to the ancient Greeks, and Arion’s challenging situation is based on historical events. But Sten’s (Life After Death at Ipsambul, 2015, etc.) dramatization of the hero’s predicaments often leans toward the obvious, such as when the reader is told: “To Arion this ship is a symbolic connection between this shore and that, as ships always have been, whether for commerce or war.” The reader is likely to already know the many uses for ships, and while Arion does eventually proceed on his way, such sentiments only manage to slow this otherwise well-paced action tale.
Alive with the difficulties of an ancient era, this Greek sailing adventure remains hampered by portions of overexplanation.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5374-6379-7
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2017
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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