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
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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