A richly textured medieval tale told with gripping suspense, keen intelligence, and aching emotion.
The love story of Abelard and Heloise frames a tangled web of medieval intrigue and trauma in this labyrinthine novel.
Herin centers her tale on three historical figures in 12th-century France. They include Peter Abelard, a renowned scholastic philosopher and logician; Heloise, a teenage girl—and a formidable intellectual—whose affair with Abelard ended badly after they secretly married and her irate uncle hired men to castrate him; and Bernard of Clairvaux, a Roman Catholic mystic and founder of the Cistercian order of monks, who charged Abelard with heresy for his rationalistic analysis of Catholic theology. The narrative unfolds mainly in the 1130s, when Heloise has become the abbess of a nunnery, filled with regrets and yearning for Abelard. He is now the abbot of a monastery and trying to stage a comeback as a philosophy professor in Paris, an ambition Bernard is hoping to thwart by lobbying the church to ban him from teaching. The story also imagines Abelard’s youth as a brilliant, arrogant prodigy; Heloise’s as an equally brilliant, passionate girl; and Bernard’s as a sickly young man whose attempts to connect with the world end in migraines and frustration. As Abelard and Heloise wrangle with their pasts, their real-life son, Astrolabe—named by geeky Heloise after an astronomical instrument—sets out to find his parents, whom he hasn’t seen since infancy. Meanwhile, Brother Gauvain, a monk and master builder, investigates a series of murders that may be linked to Abelard and Bernard’s rivalry. The monk’s probe dredges up his youthful experiences as a crusader in Jerusalem, where he participated in the psychedelic rites of the Brotherhood of Saint Anthony, a secret society that may be behind the homicides and plots he is seeking to unravel.
Herin’s yarn weaves fact and fiction into an intricate tapestry that feels a bit like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose overlaid with Knights Templar–ish conspiracies and occult symbolism concerning everything from the magic number five to the titular serpent whose gaze turns men to stone. Around an entertaining mystery, she entwines a deep exploration of the intellectual and spiritual worldview of the Middle Ages, when Christian doctrine was awkwardly absorbing not-quite-logical medieval logic. (“Surely sir, you are not such an imbecile as to not know that universal substance is indivisible…the quality man passes wholly into each individual who thus become men by virtue of the divine substance,” asserts a celebrated brainiac.) Herin’s evocative prose vividly captures the horrific earthiness of medieval life and the mindset that found an ethereal holiness in it. (Out giving alms to dying peasants, Bernard “stared into an ancient and ghastly face, one cheek eaten away, the raw edges of flesh festering with pus and green mucous” and is reminded by his mother that “one learns to smell the sweet sanctity of Christ” in the stench of diseased flesh.) The author’s characters are devoutly religious, but she unearths the psychological tensions roiling beneath sacred rituals. (Receiving Holy Communion from Abelard, Heloise “came away amazed to have actually swallowed it, even as she felt the slight tremor of his fingers as they paused before her face to lay the crust of bread on her tongue.”) The result is an absorbing clash of love, faith, reason, and violence.
A richly textured medieval tale told with gripping suspense, keen intelligence, and aching emotion.Pub Date: April 30, 2022
ISBN: 9798986104904
Page Count: 658
Publisher: Wisdom House Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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