A gripping peek into a bygone Italy and an astute look at the era’s prejudice.
A historical novel set in Italy at the end of the 18th century explores the plight of persecuted Jews and the possibility of religious tolerance.
Mirelle d’Ancona is a young Jewish girl in Ancona, Italy. Despite her family’s business success—her father owns a well-regarded ketubah workshop—she suffers from the same restrictions onerously placed on all Jews in Italy in 1796. She is prohibited from leaving the Jewish ghetto at night. And she cannot venture outside without wearing the yellow armband that marks her second-class citizenship, a humiliation not attenuated by her otherwise privileged existence: “She found it difficult to reconcile her comfortable life with the nightly imprisonment to which she and her neighbors were subjected.” Her father, Simone, pushes for her to marry Signor Morpurgo, a sensible choice considering the businessman’s wealth. But Mirelle pines for Christophe Lefevre, a French soldier under the command of Napoleon while he marches through Italy. Christophe is not only part of an invading military force, but also a Roman Catholic. Meanwhile, a Catholic named Francesca Marotti causes a stir when she claims to see a painted Madonna look down on her and shed a tear, a miraculous moment some interpret as a sign to take up arms against both the French and the Jews. Francesca is no friend of the Jews, but she doesn’t share her husband Emilio’s murderous contempt for them either. He’s pulled into a conspiracy to pulverize the Jewish community organized by Cardinal Ranuzzi. Cameron delicately details Francesca’s crisis of conscience, torn between the anti-Semitic venom of her husband and the church to which she’s devoted and the example of Jewish decency a young French soldier, Daniel Isidore, provides. The author paints a vivid tableau of the historical period with impressive rigor and authenticity. In addition, Cameron provocatively wonders if, while prejudice is eternal, past ages were better equipped to manage it. Nevertheless, the story is a stirring one that never didactically lectures readers.
A gripping peek into a bygone Italy and an astute look at the era’s prejudice.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-850-7
Page Count: 456
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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