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
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
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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