A strangely evocative, smoothly readable tale about lovers dealing with Britannia’s tribes and ancient Rome.
This third installment of a historical fiction series focuses on the tribulations of a Celtic princess and a Roman soldier.
Tanner’s (Dagger’s Destiny, 2018, etc.) latest volume in her Curse of Clansmen and Kings series chronicles not only a forbidden love, but a clash of ancient civilizations as well. The time is A.D. 24; the settings include Roman-occupied Britannia and Gaul; and the narrative follows Catrin, a Celtic warrior princess. In previous entries, readers have watched as Catrin indulged in a forbidden love affair with Roman soldier Marcellus, the son of Roman envoy Lucius Antonius. The author threw every conceivable complication in the path of her star-crossed lovers, from tribal warfare and supernatural Druidic prophecy to filial duty, which called on Catrin to defend her father’s kingdom from both the forces of the Roman Empire and the schemes of her own banished half-brother. This volume finds Catrin at a low point: She’s been enslaved by a Roman commander who sees her (and her purported mystical connection to the god Apollo) as a key to his own ambitious climb. Her lover Marcellus has had his memories of their relationship magically suppressed. Catrin is living in Roman encampments disguised as a young man named Vibius, a medical assistant grudgingly endured by the soldiers around him. The book’s action shifts frequently from the Roman frontiers to Rome itself, following its two main characters and a well-realized assortment of secondary players through a narrative liberally peppered with both local intrigues and tense action scenes. Catrin, Tanner’s central fictional creation, continues to deepen in complexity and elicit audience sympathy; her character is often refreshingly relatable. This is usually true of her paramour Marcellus, whose adventures readers follow in Rome and Gaul. But when scenes feature the two of them together, the author can sometimes yield to the kind of breathless, purple prose typically connected in most readers’ minds with a segment of the romance genre: “The heat from her body warmed his. He couldn’t let go, hearing her moans of arousal.” One of the novel’s most ambitious gambits is its richly atmospheric blending of supernatural elements into the broader story. The tale features ghosts, animal familiars, shapeshifters, and all kinds of spiritual communications, and Tanner’s skill at interweaving these elements is shown by how seamless the whole process feels. The book’s glimpses of the world of the frontier Roman army also mostly ring true, with tensions between Marcellus and his men uniformly well drawn, particularly on the several occasions when the savagery of the soldier’s own enlisted men shocks him (“The stark reality that mutilated bodies were all around him finally struck him like a brick”). This kind of fidelity to research will please readers familiar with this period of Rome’s occupation of Britain (they will likely be hunting for a mention of the legendary British resistance fighter Boudicca, and they won’t be disappointed). This is a strong entry in Tanner’s enjoyable series.
A strangely evocative, smoothly readable tale about lovers dealing with Britannia’s tribes and ancient Rome.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9982300-7-8
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Apollo Raven Publisher, LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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