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
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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