A good choice for readers who love historical tales of strong-willed women.
Strutin’s (History Hikes of the Smokies, 2003, etc.) novel tells the story of a minor character from the biblical Book of Exodus who fights for justice.
Sixteen-year-old Noa and her four sisters, Milcah, Malah, Hoglah, and Tirzah, are spirited young women making the journey with their elderly parents from Egypt to the prophesied land of their fathers. They’re following Moses, but they’ve been waiting for months for him to come down from the top of a nearby mountain, where he’s been receiving new laws from God. In the meantime, groups of men among them start to make laws for themselves, or seek out idols to help them on their journey. After a misunderstanding about some man-made rules, Noa’s father, Zelophechad, is stoned to death. Without him, and without any brothers, Noa and her sisters aren’t guaranteed a plot of land when the caravan of pilgrims reaches its destination. Noa is determined to achieve justice for her family and begins to plot ways to convince judges of their case. In the meantime, there are alliances to be made through marriage, a business to maintain, and an aging mother to care for. With great attention to detail, Strutin takes these obscure characters—who are mentioned in only three Bible verses—and spins out an in-depth account of the joys and hardships of womanhood in the ancient world. She uses each of the sisters to portray a different stage of womanly growth, from the tomboyish 8-year-old Tirzah to awkward teenager Hoglah to the eldest three, whose thoughts are of money, matrimony, and everything that comes with them. It will certainly help a prospective reader to be familiar with the plot of the Book of Exodus, at least in vague terms. That said, there’s a great deal of interpersonal drama and intrigue that will keep even nonreligious readers engaged in the tale of Noa’s sheepherding family.
A good choice for readers who love historical tales of strong-willed women.Pub Date: April 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945805-74-5
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Bedazzled Ink
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2018
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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