Sharratt’s gift for grounding larger issues in everyday lives makes for historical fiction at its best.
With this novel about Margery Kempe, mother of 14–turned–pilgrim and preacher, Sharratt’s obsession with medieval women mystics continues.
Margery, like most middle-class young women in 14th-century England, is not allowed to choose her own husband, and her true love is lost at sea. At first, she’s resigned to her parents’ choice for her, John Kempe, a brewer in the provincial town of Bishop’s Lynn, but after the birth of their first child, she suffers what now might be diagnosed as postpartum psychosis: She is hounded by hellish visions of demons, but one day, an unforgettable vision of Christ restores her to sanity. Her contentment with domesticity sours over years of nonstop childbearing—the effects of 14 pregnancies are recounted in chilling detail. In desperation, Margery insists that John join her in a mutual vow of chastity, and he acquiesces, letting Margery embark on longed-for pilgrimages, first to Jerusalem and later to Spain, to follow the path of Santiago de Compostela. Before leaving England, she meets Julian of Norwich, a mystic and “anchoress” voluntarily confined in a cell attached to a church. (Readers will recall Hildegard von Bingen’s ordeal as an anchoress’s companion in Sharratt's 2012 Illuminations.) Julian validates, by example, Margery’s belief in a personal relationship with God, free of clerical mediation. Julian also entrusts her own manuscript—doubly transgressive because it's in English and a woman wrote it—to Margery. In the Holy Land, Margery’s religious ecstasies, marked by loud weeping, are offensive, as Sharratt wryly notes, only to English Catholics; Eastern Christians are fine with it. Drawn from Kempe’s actual autobiography, the novel is enhanced by Sharratt’s storytelling ability. The pilgrimage sections are rescued from tedium by Margery’s heedlessness of social opprobrium and her resulting clashes with fellow pilgrims. Readers will root for Margery as she wins friends among a minority of kindred spirits, who, like her, dare to imagine such heresies as Scriptures in English and women writing books.
Sharratt’s gift for grounding larger issues in everyday lives makes for historical fiction at its best.Pub Date: April 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-328-51877-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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