A gripping, meticulous, and illuminating tale of war and intrigue.
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Forced from their home by invading Huns, Visigoths navigate a volatile relationship with the Roman Empire in this historical novel set in the fourth century.
When the Huns cross the Dniester River, the barrier that divides the Visigoth and Ostrogoth communities, they leave destruction in their wake, raping and pillaging without restraint. More than 100,000 Goths flee their homes, hoping to seek refuge under the protection of the Eastern Roman Empire. But the Romans see them as “uncivilized barbarians” and receive them ungenerously, disarming them and letting them starve. During a fragile peace between the Visigoths and the Romans, Alaric, a “rash and reckless” young man who lost his father to the Hun invasion, becomes a new recruit for the Roman army and establishes himself as a brave military leader with a gift for strategy, an ascendancy thrillingly portrayed by DiCarlo. When Emperor Theodosius dies and is replaced by the young Arcadius, Alaric sees a unique opportunity for the Visigoths to assert their independence, and he rises to become their first king: “I do know the Roman way. I know it well. The Romans respond only to strength. We have now an opportunity. The East is weak. We should not wait for the young emperor to become a man.” The entire novel is an impressive display of historical scholarship, notable for its painstaking exactitude and breadth. The author authentically captures the perspectives of the Goths as well as the viewpoints of their Roman and Hun adversaries. Furthermore, DiCarlo constructs a captivating drama that reveals the culture of the Visigoths in all its complexity, a depiction brimming with nuance. This is precisely what historical fiction should provide: a seamless amalgam of scholarly rigor and dramatic power, a reading experience both educational and riveting.
A gripping, meticulous, and illuminating tale of war and intrigue.Pub Date: July 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66322-385-2
Page Count: 274
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | WORLD
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
18
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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. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PROFILES
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | LITERARY FICTION | FANTASY
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