A historically astute and rousing adventure.
A historical novel set in the early 15th century details an English soldier’s dangerous mission in hostile territory.
In 1423, Henry V, the Plantagenet king of England, lies on his deathbed and summons his brother, John the Duke of Bedford, to his side. While the war against France goes well, England is becoming perilously low on funds. But the king has a plan to raise nearly inexhaustible reserves and entrusts the execution of that endeavor to John. Henry was approached by Charles d’Evreux and offered access to a fortune if he could reestablish the Order of the Temple, a militant band of monks banned a hundred years ago by the French government, and return the lands stolen from the group. Over the years, the Templars amassed unfathomable wealth and are willing to part with a considerable portion of it to see France under the rule of a friendlier king. But there is a catch: that fortune is housed in Outremer, land governed by the Turks, who are sure to be antagonistic to grasping interlopers. John picks Capt. Richard Calveley to accompany him on the hazardous journey. But John is ultimately unable to neglect his duties on the home front, so he entrusts Richard with the operation. Meanwhile, Richard’s estate is supervised in his absence by Father Hugh. The priest is blackmailed by Richard’s dastardly cousin, Geoffrey, who is obsessed with winning the ownership of the property. Father Hugh is caught in an indiscreet relationship with a married woman he loves and must choose between his public mortification and loyalty to Richard. This is the second installment in Tallon’s Richard Calveley Trilogy (The Lion and the Lily, 2016), and while a narrative ligature clearly runs from one book to the other, this stirring work can be read on its own. The author packs a lot of drama into a relatively short novel—there’s romance, political intrigue, religion, and war (Richard is shown to be an empathetic commander who is beloved by his men: “One glance from those jade green eyes and the company would cheerfully follow him to the ends of the earth”). Despite the various threads, the plot never seems cramped and is lucidly and briskly developed. In addition, the tale’s historical details are scrupulously presented, creating an aura of authenticity.
A historically astute and rousing adventure.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5462-8239-6
Page Count: 278
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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