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
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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