A historical novel richly detailed enough that it manages to be engrossing even though its hero is frequently just an...
Storm’s dazzlingly researched evocation of the Constantinople of Justinian and Theodora, the first in a proposed series, struggles to find a dramatically satisfying role for its young hero.
In 514 CE, a few years before the reign of the Roman Emperor Justinian, Valentinian Scipio Constans is born in the sleepy Greek fishing village of Volerus. His father is a humble rope maker, and his mother has died while giving birth. Nonetheless, it seems Valentinian has been marked for greatness, and his father enlists tutors to teach the boy everything from soldiering to philosophy. Valentinian is secretly descended from a noble Roman lineage. Centuries before, Scipio Africanus (foe of Hannibal and subjugator of Carthage) fathered an illegitimate child who was Valentinian's ancestor on his mother’s side. After telling his son of his heritage, Valentinian's father sends him to make a name for himself in Constantinople. Luckily, his tutor Leo is a friend of General Belisarius’ soon-to-be sister-in-law, a connection that quickly places Valentinian in the company of the illustrious. During this middle portion of the novel, Constantinople is described, and its history relayed, through characters’ conversations and storytelling, and the narrative momentum noticeably slackens. When the Nika riots break out during Belisarius’ wedding dinner, the story finds its pacing again as Valentinian plays a role in helping the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church escape an angry mob. Storm relates a thorough history of these riots, which nearly brought Justinian’s reign to a premature end, complete with the maneuverings of the Senate and the Imperial court. Storm uses muscular prose to pack these passages with his digested research, and they are both immediate and instructive. From a dramatic standpoint, however, the main character has little more than a peripheral role in the key events, leading to an abundance of scenes that are interesting without being exciting. Promisingly for future volumes, by novels’ end Valentinian is well placed to be on the frontlines of Justinian and Belisarius’ campaigns to reconquer the lost provinces of the Western Roman Empire.
A historical novel richly detailed enough that it manages to be engrossing even though its hero is frequently just an observer of events.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466479821
Page Count: 262
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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