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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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