by Peter Tremayne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2022
A mystery embedded in a revealing look at the violently differing theological views of early Christians.
An exceedingly clever lawyer, a woman of great stature among her people, delves into another series of crimes in the year 672.
Sister Fidelma, an advocate of the Irish law courts, and her companion, East Anglia transplant Brother Eadulf, are returning from a trip when they hear of the death of a visiting Burgundian bishop at a nearby abbey. Abbot Cuán asks the couple, well known for solving thorny mysteries, to investigate a case they soon realize is connected to the battle over whose theology will rule Christianity. Everyone disliked Bishop Brodulf, who insisted that instead of staying in the abbey's guest quarters he'd stay in an old wooden structure behind the abbey—which ended up burning with him inside, though the dagger in his chest showed that the blaze was no accident. The abbey is slowly replacing all its wooden structures with stone buildings, and it appears the fire had help from the sulphur dust the masons used to split rock. The abbey is a mixed house where members of both sexes live and work, producing some suggestive undercurrents. The bishop had been arguing violently with the abbey’s star pupil, Brother Garb, whose opinions were antithetical to his. Garb believed both in the equality of women and in the heretical idea that Jesus was not the son of God but only a wise man. The bishop, who was caught rummaging in the library, is known to have stolen some paperwork concerning the line of succession in the land of the Franks. When the murder of Brother Garb is added to her problems, Fidelma must use all her finely honed skills to unravel a complex case.
A mystery embedded in a revealing look at the violently differing theological views of early Christians.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8966-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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by Allison Pataki ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024
The author never finds her subject in this mostly lackluster account of a memorable literary figure.
A fictionalized take on the trailblazing life of 19th-century feminist Margaret Fuller.
Much has been written about Fuller, including a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography published in 2014. But Pataki believes Fuller still hasn’t gotten her due—especially in comparison to her male contemporaries. Hence this novel, which begins in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1836, when the 26-year-old Margaret—home-schooled by her father and highly educated for a woman of her time—first visits Ralph Waldo Emerson. Waldo, as he was known, becomes her great mentor and friend, and soon Margaret is keeping company with the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In this telling, Emerson and Hawthorne are wildly attracted to her—Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is thought to have been inspired by Fuller—but remain tied to their traditional wives. Though not exactly lonely, Margaret, who narrates her story, is portrayed as a woman alone, struggling with financial woes. Yet soon enough she is making a name for herself, leading groundbreaking conversation groups for women; editing The Dial, journal of the Transcendentalists; writing books; and working for social reform. After she signs on as a journalist for the New-York Tribune, editor Horace Greeley sends her to report from Europe as the first female foreign correspondent. Margaret eventually arrives in Italy to cover the country’s fight for independence and begins an affair with a Roman soldier, Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she has a baby. Despite these dramatic events, much of the novel is earnest and tame, the opposite of a page-turner. There’s a lot of clumsy exposition and literary name-dropping, with dialogue nowhere near as lively as the characters speaking it.
The author never finds her subject in this mostly lackluster account of a memorable literary figure.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593600238
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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by Allison Pataki and Owen Pataki
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2021
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
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IndieBound Bestseller
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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