A compulsively readable adventure yarn, all the more so for being based on real events.
A young stowaway becomes an integral part of Shackleton’s 1914 attempt to cross the South Pole.
With the help of some friends on board, 17-year-old Merce Blackboro sneaks aboard Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, bound for Antarctica during the early days of World War I, as it re-supplies in Argentina. Shackleton intends to become the first to cross the continent from sea to sea, via the pole. Soon after Endurance sets sail, Merce is discovered hiding in a supply locker. Despite giving him a vicious tongue-lashing, Shackleton is impressed by young Blackboro's verve and gives him a job helping in Endurance's galley, as well as making him his personal steward. However, spots on Shackleton’s ship were highly sought after, so there are those aboard who might begrudge Blackboro’s place among the crew, especially when Sir Ernest assigns him the relatively labor-free task of organizing his library while reading accounts of previous polar expeditions. Unfortunately for Shackleton and his crew, they make their attempt during a particularly chilly winter, and the Endurance is trapped by pack ice before ever reaching the continent. After being lost for 635 days, Shackleton must use all of his skills as a seasoned explorer—and as a leader—to get his crew safely home. Bonné (Wie Wir Verschwinden, 2009) has crafted a compelling adventure novel drawn from actual events. His characters live and breathe, as does the book's desolate setting, which draws the reader deep into Shackleton's frigid world. There is a stunning level of technical detail—of the ship, the crew, Shackleton's place in the history of Antarctic exploration, etc.—all of which does nothing to clutter or detract from the gripping narrative. Nor does the rather dreamlike language, which helps conjure the icily surreal world of the Antarctic. Even readers familiar with the historical events on which the book is based will find themselves turning pages to find out what happens next.
A compulsively readable adventure yarn, all the more so for being based on real events.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59020-140-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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
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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