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
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
© 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.
