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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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