An intricately detailed but emotionally flat novel set in early medieval Ireland.
A monk and an upstart king take on a tyrant in De Fougerolles’ latest historical novel in a series.
Columba, a long-exiled abbot and prince, has returned to his native Ireland. For years, he has lived on the Scottish isle of Iona, building a monastery; now he’s come back home, where he’s at the side of his old friend, Aedan mac Gabran, who reigns as the new king of the united Dal Riatas, a small state that spans the channel between Scotland and Ireland. Aedan’s come to make war on an old enemy—the overking of Ulaid, Baetan mac Cairell, who currently holds both of Aedan’s wives and one of his sons hostage. Aedan’s grip on the fractious Dal Riata is tenuous: “As I see it, you seek to unite, if you can, rather than to divide,” Columba advises Aedan. “That is a noble pursuit, a virtue in anyone….Whether you can unite here, we can only wait and see. But you must act; you know you must.” In order to win allies to their cause, Columba and Aedan must install a teenager, imprisoned by Baetan mac Cairell, on the throne of a nearby kingdom.At the same time, they’re desperate to learn the fate of Eogan mac Gabran, Aedan’s brother who was recently kidnapped by rogue monks. The two quests will take the friends through the petty kingdoms of northern Ireland, negotiating a complex political system involving warlords, abbots, and kings. At the same time, a plague has arrived from the continent and is slowly creeping north across the island. Can Aedan and Columba hold their weakened federation together long enough to defeat a tyrant? It will take all their bravery and cunning—and perhaps a bit of help from Columba’s God.
Historian de Fougerolles displays a deep understanding of the nuances of ancient Irish society, offering readers a blend of Gaelic cultural practices and insular Christian theology. Here, for example, Columba explains in detail how a petty king might beneficially cultivate a monastery on his lands: “Being dicenn—being kinless, or ‘headless’, as they say—the exiled Christian may apply to the lord of the strange land in which they find themselves, to petition that he take them under his protection….For, in law, as you know, the king of a tuath is responsible—can choose to be responsible—for a kinless man.” This loving attention to history is offset, though, by a relative lack of development when it comes to characters’ psychology. There’s plenty of scheming and oath-swearing, but readers may have trouble finding very much to care about in these men and women, in part because so many of their motivations are rooted in their cultural moment. The author does her best to make the material accessible—there are plenty of maps, a glossary, a timeline, and a guide to pronouncing the many unintuitive proper names—but the biggest barrier that readers will face is the lack of relatable stakes. An intricately detailed but emotionally flat novel set in early medieval Ireland.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9780692043868
Page Count: 421
Publisher: Careswell Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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