A richly rendered tale of divided loyalties in a colonized land.
A young Roman Jew is torn between assimilation and rebellion in Schiffren’s debut historical novel.
Marcus’ conception was a mistake. His mother is Miriam, the daughter of a Jewish merchant family in the Asian Minor city of Sardis; his father is Julius, a centurion stationed with the Roman legion garrisoned there. They do not marry until Marcus is 3 years old—even then, it is more out of their mutual love for Marcus rather than their tumultuous feelings for one another. They finally wed according to the Roman rite. Julius, the proud Roman, refuses to be circumcised and convert to Judaism, but Miriam insists on raising Marcus according to the traditions of her people. As a child, Marcus does not have too much trouble navigating his dual identity. At home, he follows the Jewish law of his mother and grandfather, Daniel, while outside he trains in the Roman martial traditions of his father. With his father’s connections, Marcus will have the opportunity to pursue a career in the Roman army, which comes with the benefit of Roman citizenship, a benefit rarely extended to Jews. However, when his father is relocated to Caesarea, the capital of the Roman province of Judea, the contradictions of Marcus’ identity become heightened. The Jews there regard the Romans as an occupying force—it wasn’t that long ago that the Romans destroyed the Second Temple to bring the Jews to heel—and some are actively fomenting rebellion. Marcus begins to learn his Jewish family’s trade from his Uncle Yehonatan, a wealthy merchant who has spent many years in Babylon. In addition to commerce, Yehonatan introduces Marcus to the mystical traditions of his faith…and to the revolutionary politics simmering at the Jewish academy in Yavneh. “You think you have the soul of a soldier,” a revered rabbi tells Marcus. “But that’s not entirely so. Be careful, lest you find your true self neither in one place nor the other. A soldier kills. And what for?” If war is inevitable, it will surely pit his mother’s family—indeed, his entire people—against the Roman army, Julius included. Marcus will be forced to fight one side of himself or the other, but which will he choose?
Schiffren illuminates the world of second century Judea in vivid detail, from the competing religious traditions to the period-specific material concerns. For example, Yehonatan is involved in trade for the shells of the murex snail, which are used to make the royal purple dye “popular everywhere, inside the empire and out of it.” (Tyre, the capital of the trade, is described as “stinking of fishy commerce.”) Against this backdrop, the author explores the competing influences in young Marcus’ life. The dichotomy extends even to the young man’s romantic interests: He is drawn to both Devorah, the dutiful daughter of his rabbi mentor, and Helen, a beautiful gentile widow. The push-and-pull will no doubt speak to many contemporary readers who find themselves similarly caught between cultures. Even those who do not personally relate will find themselves swept up in Marcus’ story, which dramatizes a fascinating time and place in antiquity.
A richly rendered tale of divided loyalties in a colonized land.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781960456113
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Woodhall Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
