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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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