A notably original reinterpretation of an ancient legend ensconced within an epic tale of political power and romantic...
A historical novel reimagines the story of the Queen of Sheba as well as the construction of the First Temple of Jerusalem.
Makeda, later known as the Queen of Sheba, is born of a union both lowly and regal: Her mother is a slave and her father, Karibil, is chieftain of Maryaba and mukarrib of all Saba. An illegitimate child, she sees her half sister, Bilkis, overtaken by a fierce flood. Karibil then marries Makeda’s mother, leaving the girl as his only child and the sole heir of her father’s authority. Years later, ruling over a peaceful Saba, Makeda learns of a project underway in Yisrael to construct a temple out of stone, an engineering feat that could be replicated in her realm to build a much-needed dam. She travels to Yisrael in order to learn more and discovers that Bilkis, presumed dead, is the queen there, and her son, Yahtadua, is the king, an accomplishment won through a series of machinations as cruel as they were strategically brilliant, chillingly depicted by Graham (Of Ashes and Dust, 2017). Bilkis sees an opportunity in her sibling’s fortuitous arrival. If Makeda would marry Yahtadua and bear him a son, Bilkis could arrange to hoard all the power for herself and her descendants: “You will not be queen here. Once you give Yahtadua a son, you may go back to that sand pit you love so much. The boy will remain here, and when he comes of age he shall rule over Yisrael and Saba and all the lands between.” But Makeda has no interest in Yahtadua and has developed feelings for Yetzer, the mason chiefly responsible for the building of the temple and a man loathed by Bilkis. Graham acknowledges in an authorial note that he’s “taken generous liberties with the source material.” But that artistic license never undermines the novel’s impressive historical authenticity—readers are furnished with a remarkable look at the political and cultural milieu of the ancient time. And even some of the more conspicuous historical departures—the author imagines a polytheistic Yisrael—are both captivating and defensible on scholarly grounds. The story itself is brimming with intrigue and ingeniously conjured, although its soap-operatic entanglements can become densely complex and tedious to follow. In addition, Graham’s prose can reach powerfully poetic heights, but it can also be ponderously melodramatic and would have benefited from a measure of lighthearted leavening. Sometimes the dialogue reads like it should be sonorously bellowed from a mountaintop or engraved in stone: “ ‘We may be forgotten,’ Yetzer said, ‘forsaken by men, unnamed before the gods. But if only we know, if only we remember we are more than beasts, we will truly have been men and our ka will speak for us before the scales of Mayat.’ ” Nevertheless, the author’s revisionist interpretation of both the fable and the details of the temple’s construction is as historically creative as it is fictionally sweeping, a true saga however flawed.
A notably original reinterpretation of an ancient legend ensconced within an epic tale of political power and romantic longing.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943075-57-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Amphorae Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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