The latest page-turner from Gregory (The Boleyn Inheritance, Dec. 2006, etc.) is a sobering account of the English slave trade, with a bit of romance thrown in.
In 1787 Africa, Mehuru, an envoy for his Yoruban king, is traveling the empire to deliver the king’s edict: Yorubans will desist in all slave-trading with white slavers. Mehuru is captured by the English and thrown onto a slave ship owned by Josiah Cole, a small Bristol merchant with dreams of advancement. He and his sister Sarah have done all they can with their three modest vessels—they kidnap Africans, trade them for sugar and rum in the West Indies, then sell the goods in England—but since much of the better trade is denied them because of their class, Josiah decides to marry up. He finds Frances Scott, niece to a prominent lord, but herself a penniless orphan. To both, it is an even exchange—Josiah gets connections to circles of business he could never enter, and Frances has a home. It is Josiah and Sarah’s new plan that a handful of slaves will be brought back to England where Frances will tutor them in the ways of the gentry, selling them for an enormous profit. Mehuru and ten others are chained in a cellar, where they are half-starved, raped by Josiah’s house guest and whipped, while spending afternoons in the parlor learning polite English. Frances and Mehuru eventually fall in love, and Josiah risks ruin in financial schemes dependent on a single ship cruelly over-packed with captured Africans. The success of this tale lies in the author’s nuanced portraits: Frances, a product of her class, is refined, ignorant and selfish (even while devoted to Mehuru, she is shocked when he joins radicals dedicated to ceasing the trade—her livelihood). Cultured Mehuru lives in a state of astonishment that other humans could be so barbaric. And most interestingly, Sarah, proud of her independence and financial partnership with Josiah, is crushed when he forces her to stay cooped up with Frances and become a “lady.”
A vivid depiction of the trade and the ruined lives left in its wake.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-7254-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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