A diverting read for fans of the Arthurian legends.
Hume’s second trilogy picks up where her Merlin series ended.
When last seen in Hume’s book, Merlin, who goes by the name Myrddion, had helped secret the newly born son of the evil Uther Pendragon and his beautiful wife, Ygerne, who was raped and forced to marry the cruel Briton king after he murdered her husband. The child, now known as Artorex, lives with the gentleman farmer Ector and his noble Roman wife, Livinia, at their estate. Every so often, Myrddion and two Celtic kings check on the boy’s progress. As Artorex approaches manhood, the three instruct an old warrior named Targo to educate him in the skills of fighting and horsemanship, while Ector is tasked to see to the boy’s education. Artorex must remain hidden from King Uther, who will kill the child to prevent his succession to the throne. Meanwhile, Artorex’s half sister, Morgan, is keeping Uther alive long enough to destroy almost everything the young Artorex holds dear. Artorex then journeys to see his father and undertakes a suicide mission to prove to the Celtic people that he is the right person to rule them. As in her previous trilogy, the author, an Arthurian academic, adds perceived authenticity to her tales by incorporating true-to-life details surrounding the difficult, hardscrabble lives of those who survived in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. The day-to-day living, from food to attitudes about war, politics and social station, is fascinating, and the author goes into enormous detail to describe life in Arthurian England; but in this first volume, the prose tends to wax a little too flowery on occasion. Even though the writing is less compelling and the story briefly goes off the rails early in the book with a nasty subplot concerning child abuse, the evolving narrative is worth reading.
A diverting read for fans of the Arthurian legends.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1518-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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