An entertaining and informative tale about Irish life and the coming of the English at the end of the Middle Ages.
Duffy provides a tale of survival set in tumultuous 12-century Ireland.
A teenager lives with his enslaved father, who teaches him the language and stories of his ancestors. In 1171, Alberic’s life changes when he undertakes tasks that, in the eyes of those around him, prove his courage; he successfully retrieves a powerful stone called a kelt for Mánus, and on a raid into the land of the lord’s enemy, he kills his first man. He also falls in love with Ness, a woman captured during the raid. Later, Alberic is captured by English invaders who’d been making their way north, and he finds himself caught between the people who enslaved him and those who share his ancestry. The English Baron de Lacy grows to trust him and sends him north to help conquer Mánus’ province. Alberic fights for the baron but attempts to protect civilians. Duffy bases his story on true historical events of the Norman conquest of Ireland, although Alberic himself is fictional. However, his work provides an engaging story that a nonfiction work could not; historians know little of the lives of people like Alberic, so it is a treat to immerse oneself in Duffy’s conjectures. It’s a gritty, unpredictable, and violent world that also has moments of beauty (“a bright, many-tongued stream, running thin over the stone, had cut in beneath an overhanging tree, the deep water beneath a shelter for speckled fish”), poetry, and even references to magic. Duffy provides a glossary of Gaelic, Latin, Norse, and Middle English and character lists, but some readers may still become frustrated by the frequency of unfamiliar terms and names; Alberic narrates his story in a manner that’s believable enough to pull the reader along.
An entertaining and informative tale about Irish life and the coming of the English at the end of the Middle Ages.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 9781947976344
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Cynren Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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