A heady, deeply researched mix of history, myth, and imagination.
A prophecy guides a 7th-century prince-turned-pirate across the seas to the New World, where his destiny lies with a Mayan princess and her gods.
Off the coast of Spain in the year 610, a merchant ship carrying 12-year-old Visigothic Spanish prince Iudila is captured by pirates. Over the next few months, the captain repeatedly rapes the boy, until Iudila, a natural leader, gains allies among the crew and absorbs their “lessons of sky and sea, as the stars—the heavenly guides and weavers of men’s fates—made their slow, inexorable night-walk through the heavens.” Thoughts of regaining his rightful place as royalty fade after an encounter with a prophesying monk and a fraught voyage, guided by a map of mysterious origin. The ship’s destination: a Mayan kingdom and, it turns out, Iudila’s heart’s desire. Graham (Song of Songs, 2019, etc.) then goes back in time to tell the story of Mayan princess Chakin’s eventful childhood and adolescence. She and Iudila have their fated meeting in a kingdom that’s threatened by a twisted shaman’s powers and shaped by a connection to Iudila’s own history. In this richly immersive novel, images of brutality and beauty propel the plot as the author digs deep into historical, anthropological, and religious source materials. The book’s closing notes offer Graham’s compelling insights into how his research shaped the story and its characters—Chakin’s father, Uti-Chan, and Iudila himself are among several real-life figures that he’s woven into the plot. The author also explains the inspiration for two vividly imagined elements that readers may find controversial—the founding of a family dynasty by a semidivine Jesus (here known by the Aramaic name Yahshua), and a long-ago visit to the New World by ancient Hebrews who leave a mystical mark on Mayan culture. Graham also includes a helpful glossary of names and places, a list of recommended works by historians and anthropologists, and a hint of a sequel to come.
A heady, deeply researched mix of history, myth, and imagination.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943075-63-8
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Amphorae Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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