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
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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