An edifying exploration of religious persecution.
In Maddox’s historical novel, a Jewish woman in Milan must contend with extraordinary pressure to convert to Christianity.
It is the fifth century C.E. Shifra and her husband, Benjamin, both hail from Alexandria, Egypt, but have spent the last 30 years in Milan, always wary of the pressure put on Jews like themselves to convert to the regnant faith of Christianity. They maintain their beliefs, but after Benjamin, a physician, is beaten to death one night out of a prejudicial contempt for his religion, Shifra is faced with a terrible choice: Bishop Marolus demands that she finally become a Christian or face a tax on her estate so steep it will leave her all but penniless. She defiantly stands her ground, but life for her in Milan becomes all but unbearable—Shifra is also physically assaulted for being Jewish—so she moves back to Alexandria to live with her younger brother, Akiva, a secretary to Orestes, the Roman governor of upper Egypt and an influential man. In this powerful moral drama, Shifra sadly discovers that Akiva’s success depends upon his own conversion to Christianity, and he strongly encourages her to follow suit. Meanwhile, Shifra’s servant, Dacia, struggles to maintain her religious identity as well—raised an Arian Christian, she is seen as a heretic by the Nicene Christians who make up the majority. The author meticulously portrays the depth of Shifra’s moral predicament—she could continue to worship as she pleases in private, if only she would renounce her faith publicly (“Sometimes dissembling is the price of survival”). However, such a disavowal seems to her like a betrayal of both her ancestors and Benjamin, who is considered by Bishop Marolus to be “forever lost, doomed to eternity in Hell.” Maddox rigorously reconstructs the historical setting and its political and cultural tensions. This is a gripping blend of astute historical commentary and literary drama.
An edifying exploration of religious persecution.Pub Date: July 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781839196188
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Hypatia Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2025
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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