A historically and fictionally engaging novel that brings little-known era to vivid life.
In this historical drama, set in the early 7th century, a young man is burdened with a weighty responsibility: to save an embattled Roman Empire from a tyrannical emperor.
Heraclius the Younger grows up under the disciplined but loving tutelage of his father, Heraclius the Elder—an accomplished general who rises to the rank of Magister Militum per Armeniam, the top-ranking officer in Armenia, and then the Exarch of Carthage. By the time Heraclius turns 18, his future is decided: He will follow his father’s lead and become a military man. However, he’s soon compelled to shoulder extraordinary responsibility long before he’s fully prepared to do so, when his family is recruited to join an effort to overthrow the disastrous rule of the “bitter centurion” Phocas, who kills Emperor Mauricius in order to claim the throne for himself. As a result, the Roman Empire’s enemies are emboldened; the Persians who made peace with Mauricius turn bellicose, and the Avars storm the empire’s increasingly vulnerable borders. Heraclius is sent by his father on a “life-or-death mission to rescue Rome,” a dangerous task that the family sees not as a rebellion, but rather as a “restoration” of Rome’s former glory. Storm (From Africanus, 2015, etc.), with magisterial historical command, depicts a bedraggled Rome long after its proudest years, when it was stymied by military failure and the ravages of the Black Plague, and he beautifully captures its loss of confidence, as in this passage: “What is the Empire now that it is no longer young, now that it no longer expands, now that the Legions are no longer endless, now that She is no longer Impervious?” The author says in a prefatory note that he’s “no historian,” but the meticulous research that must have been necessary to produce such an accurate portrait of the era belies such modesty. However, this is a novel and not a historical treatise, and the paucity of known information about Heraclius—the record is riddled with “hyperbole, invention, gaps, and opinion,” according to the author—provides plenty of space for an impressive feat of literary invention. But although Storm’s prose can be dramatically elegant, it can also indulge in melodramatic verbosity, particularly when the subject matter turns romantic: “Now she felt the courage of a tigress when she looked into Heraclius’ eyes because she no longer cared. And she saw the same lightning bolt strike Heraclius as surely as if it had been Neptune’s triton that pierced his heart.” However, the novel as a whole remains gripping, as it’s an intelligent and uncommon blend of masterful history and artistic creation. What makes the book even more tantalizing, however, is that it focuses on a largely neglected period of the Roman Empire—one that’s long after its capital moved to Constantinople, when it suffered a considerable loss in power and influence. Storm acts as a sure-footed guide over this terrain, and an entertaining one, too.
A historically and fictionally engaging novel that brings little-known era to vivid life.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-615-55716-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: The Last Roman LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.
A star-crossed romance captures the turmoil of pre-revolutionary Iran in Seraji’s debut.
From the rooftops of Tehran in 1973, life looks pretty good to 17-year-old Pasha Shahed and his friend Ahmed. They’re bright, funny and good-looking; they’re going to graduate from high school in a year; and they’re in love with a couple of the neighborhood girls. But all is not idyllic. At first the girls scarcely know the boys are alive, and one of them, Zari, is engaged to Doctor—not actually a doctor but an exceptionally gifted and politically committed young Iranian. In this neighborhood, the Shah is a subject of contempt rather than veneration, and residents fear SAVAK, the state’s secret police force, which operates without any restraint. Pasha, the novel’s narrator and prime dreamer, focuses on two key periods in his life: the summer and fall of 1973, when his life is going rather well, and the winter of 1974, when he’s incarcerated in a grim psychiatric hospital. Among the traumatic events he relates are the sudden arrest, imprisonment and presumed execution of Doctor. Pasha feels terrible because he fears he might have inadvertently been responsible for SAVAK having located Doctor’s hiding place; he also feels guilty because he’s always been in love with Zari. She makes a dramatic political statement, setting herself on fire and sending Pasha into emotional turmoil. He is both devastated and further worried when the irrepressible Ahmed also seems to come under suspicion for political activity. Pasha turns bitterly against religion, raising the question of God’s existence in a world in which the bad guys seem so obviously in the ascendant. Yet the badly scarred Zari assures him, “Things will change—they always do.”
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-451-22681-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the...
Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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