An enjoyable historical novel that reveals a different side of a well-known region.
Pizzati (Venetian-English English-Venetian, 2007, etc.) offers a historical novel about the seventh-century birth of Venice, Italy.
Primo, 18, and Polo, 16, are brothers in a poor, rural farm family near the town of Opterg in the Byzantine Empire. Just before most of their clan are wiped out by invading Germanic Longobards, they’re told by their uncle, Licio, that they’re actually royalty, hidden away to keep them safe. The brothers are separated when they escape the aforementioned raid and end up adopted by families in small villages in part of the Byzantine Empire near the Adriatic Sea. Polo comes up with the idea of developing the villages adjoining the canals in the area that’s now Venice, hoping that the water will slow the Longobards. Polo also has the vision to see the value of increased trade between farmers and fishermen; the brothers reunite on one such trading mission. Polo goes on to become the first doge (leader) of Venice, with Primo as his primary shipbuilder; together they open trade routes to Africa and Asia. The novel also tells the story of fierce Longobard warrior Adalulf, who turns his back on his people in order to be with his youngest son, Aldo, and escape the Longobards’ new ruler, Grimwald, who vows revenge against Adalulf for causing the deaths of his two older brothers years before. Venetian historian Pizzati has created a well-developed, multigenerational cast of characters to populate his novel, a good percentage of whom are based on real-life historical figures. Still, despite their number, it’s simple to keep track of the many players. There’s plenty of treachery amid the politics and the battles, and Europe evolves as it faces the threat of invading Arabs. Pizzati’s work feels much shorter than its 500-plus pages, as the narrative rolls smoothly along over a period of decades. Two maps will help readers follow the major characters through the lands located around the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and Black seas. Overall, Pizzati has crafted an incisive exploration of a lesser-known piece of history.
An enjoyable historical novel that reveals a different side of a well-known region.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-5891-5
Page Count: 514
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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