An entertaining Bronze Age soap-opera full of carnage, carnality, and a little hard-bitten philosophy.
Murder, war, conspiracies, religious antagonism, and holy harlotry roil ancient Sumeria in this historical novel.
Naoum’s saga unfolds in the city of Uruk on the Euphrates River during the bloody reign of King Sargon of Akkad, circa 2300 B.C. Life there revolves around power, sex, and the gods, as embodied in two institutions: the intrigue-filled court of the cruel, capricious Sargon (“Innocent, guilty—I don’t care. Execute! No mercy, execute!” reads a typical soliloquy) and the temple of Ishtar, goddess of love, and her popular cult of ritual sex work (her virgin acolytes must sell their bodies to any man who tosses them a “silver piece” before they can wed). A teeming cast of characters swirls through the hyperactive narrative, including Ibrahem, Sargon’s manipulative court sculptor, who maneuvers the king into killing the High Priest Ishullanu during a public sex ceremony honoring the god Anu. Then there’s Ibrahem’s son Isaa, a scribe who falls in love with Princess Enheduanna, Sargon’s daughter and an Ishtar follower. And there’s Mayram, a gorgeous temple sex worker who poses as a virgin to lure noblemen and kills them while they copulate (Ibrahem uses her to assassinate his and Sargon’s enemies). Larger developments occur during all the plotting and fornication, including a rebellion in the city of Ur and the rise of the monotheistic cult of Invisible One, which Isaa is drawn to. Backgrounding all the stabbings and beheadings is a sweeping, richly textured portrait of Mesopotamian culture, full of lore about everything from how to make a clay writing tablet to regional mythologies that feel like a polytheistic draft of Genesis.
The characters are vibrant if often grotesque—Sargon’s villainy is fearsome enough to merit a carved granite stele—and Naoum’s storytelling and prose are vigorous and evocative in their depictions of sex, violence, and splattery combinations of sex and violence. (“[H]e could only watch the blade plunge down into his chest…Mayram reached the peaks of ecstasy with the swell of his lust inside her and the burst of his lifeblood over her skin. Passionately, she closed her mouth on his, sucking out the last of his pleasure moans and silencing the groans of his death throes.”) In a deeper vein, the author explores characters’ religious feelings, which are sometimes plangent and heartfelt (“Tammara placed her daughter’s body in a jar that she sealed with bitumen. Every night, she would cradle the jar as she sang a sad melody, hoping that the goddess of the netherworld, Ereshkigal, would have pity on her, and by some miracle bring her baby back”) and sometimes cynical about the exploitation that theology justifies (“the rituals that reap the most profits are the ones that exploit the believers’ fears of the gods—drivel like, honor this god to keep the demons away…or the best of them all—a pilgrimage to some holy shrine is a must”). The result is a colorful if sometimes lurid period piece that will keep readers turning pages.
An entertaining Bronze Age soap-opera full of carnage, carnality, and a little hard-bitten philosophy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781733360739
Page Count: 642
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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