Overlong and slow-paced, but compelling despite its flaws.
Griffith picks up Hild's story where her eponymous 2013 novel left off.
When last we saw Hild, she had just been made the Lady of Elmet. She and her new husband (and half brother), Cian Boldcloak, are responsible for holding southern Northumbre for her uncle Edwin, the king. The 7th century was a tumultuous time in Britain. Regional rulers like Edwin clashed as they sought to control the whole island and Christian priests vied with old gods. Hild survived a perilous childhood by making a reputation as a seer and, later, by becoming a fierce warrior. What she wants isn’t power; it’s a safe home for those she loves and those in her care. She knows that war is coming, and leading her people through it will require foresight, cunning, and terrible sacrifice. As she did in Hild, Griffith offers a richly textured vision of life in early-medieval Britain. She takes incredible care in the language she uses, avoiding modern metaphors and generally choosing words of Germanic or Celtic origin over Latinate words. She also dots her text with terms straight from Old English, which has the wonderfully paradoxical effect of pulling the reader into Hild’s universe while reminding us that this place is, for us, strange and ultimately irrecoverable. And there are moments of exquisite poetry throughout the text, particularly in descriptions of the natural world. Where this book falters is in its length, its pace, and a list of characters that will be unmanageable for most readers. For example, the first quarter of the book—almost 200 pages—describes the lead-up to a war between Edwin and rival kings. The political machinations are not easy to follow; nor are they, ultimately, very enlightening. Most of the conversations among Hild, Edwin, and other powerful players are about what they don’t know and, given that the text seldom strays from Hild’s point of view, the reader receives no insights that she doesn’t have. There’s also a tremendous amount of repetition. The word “seax”—a type of knife—occurs 92 times in this novel and, in most instances, Hild is grasping hers or adjusting hers or drawing attention to hers because she feels uneasy or wishes to assert her power. And every time she does it, she becomes more of a figure from pantomime than a real and singular woman.
Overlong and slow-paced, but compelling despite its flaws.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780374208080
Page Count: 736
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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