An entertaining tale of a holy heist and its aftermath.
Serby’s caper novel about the theft of a sacred relic offers wry entertainment with ruminative underpinnings.
It’s 1945 and World War II is effectively over in Europe. Two American GIs, Nick Genova and Joe Cohen, have fought their way up the Italian Peninsula and are now on leave in Milan. The two New Yorkers are so close that they’re known as a single unit called “Brooklyn.” Nick has heard about a local relic known as the Holy Nail—supposedly one of those used to nail Jesus Christ to the cross. The pair, with help of Maria Bravia, an antifascist and a stone-cold killer, steal it from the Duomo, the cathedral of Milan. Now the game is afoot. Do they sell it? Bargain with the Catholic Church to ransom it? Eventually the police, the Mafia (both in Naples and New York), and the Vatican are all drawn into the fray. Later, “Brooklyn” is repatriated to Brooklyn, where they’re still trying to get rid of the Nail, and hopefully profit from their crime. It does not go well, as dealings with the Mafia seldom do. However, there is a final, intriguing fillip to the tale, involving the Nail and one of Joe’s relations, just in case readers had gotten too smug. Any novel about holy relics, and particularly a satirical one such as this, must grapple with the fact that holy relics have been a booming business for scammers for centuries. The Holy Nail is an actual object that resides today at the Duomo in Milan, where it’s presumably shown to the faithful once a year—but this novel amusingly throws it into doubt, as if to ask what a reader going to believe: the skeptics or their own eyes? (The belief that Jesus’ foreskin is preserved in some church somewhere—briefly mentioned in the text—need not detain readers.) A final plot turn leaves readers with a wonderful theological teaser about the power of faith and feels as if Serby has set out to gleefully blow up his own satire.
An entertaining tale of a holy heist and its aftermath.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9798317814977
Page Count: 208
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
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