A captivating reboot of the Jezebel narrative, combining biblical drama with a rich portrait of ancient women’s struggles.
One of the Bible’s most reviled women tells her side of the story in Watters’ historical novel.
This sprawling work revisits the tale of Queen Jezebel and King Ahab, putting positive spins on their alleged ruthlessness and impiety. It opens with Yezeba’al—princess of Sidon and incarnation of the goddess Ashtarti (the consort of the god Ba’al)—arriving in Shomron, the capital of Yisrael. She’s set to marry King Akhab, who’s besotted with her and indifferent to his other wives and concubines. Yezeba’al becomes a lightning-rod for local monotheists who worship the god Yahowah. They abhor her Ba’alist polytheism and revealing outfits, and they misunderstand female Ba’alist clerics’ practice of having sex in the temple with any man who pays them, which the women see as a form of “healing and enlightenment through the sex act.” The Yahwists are led by the prophet Eliyah, who occasionally criticizes Yezeba’al, prophesizes doom, and conjures fake miracles with Egyptian magic tricks. Yezeba’al convinces Akhab to order the execution of lesser rebellious Yahwist prophets—Eliyah is spared—and to become a High Priest of Ba’al in a semi-public sexual ritual with her; the ceremony ends a series of miscarriages and enables her to eventually bear several children. Yezeba’al continues sparring with Yahwists, refereeing harem conflicts, and strategizing against her loathsome cousin Hadadesar, king of Aram, who invades Yisrael. When she orders the unjust execution of obstreperous businessman Nabot, it provokes a dire curse from Eliyah. Later, Yezeba’al takes dozens of lovers, eventually settling on a priest of Ba’al. Meanwhile, she advises her erratic son, King Yoram, who ignores her warnings about his Yahwist general, Yehu, until a revolt threatens to destroy the family.
Watters’ colorful, imaginatively detailed rendering of the biblical narrative highlights Yezeba’al’s ancient feminism, which deems that harems are tolerable (but not consummation before a bride is 14); that wives and widows are entitled to sexual satisfaction; and that women should call the shots when men fail. Yezeba’al has many people killed, and her Ba’alism does seem like a sketchy sex cult, but her narration makes her actions understandable as measures to protect her kingdom and relatives, and to defend religious pluralism. In Watters’ vigorous, Old Testament-style prose, Yezeba’al endures much abuse (“Death to the idolatress! May the dogs eat your flesh!” say her detractors), but energetically dishes it out, too, as when she threatens a Chinese ambassador who insults Akhab: “Your blood shall paint the floors of this hall red, and we shall dance in it while the beasts and the insects dine upon your flesh.” Watters also writes evocatively of women’s everyday ordeals, as when Leah, one of Akhab’s wives, goes through a difficult labor: “Unable to stand on her own, she was supported by her two faithful concubines, while the midwife she had appointed knelt on the floor at her feet, careless of the blood and fluid pooling around her.” Overall, Yezeba’al is a protagonist whom readers will root for as she contends with—and sometimes falls in love with—patriarchs of every stripe.
A captivating reboot of the Jezebel narrative, combining biblical drama with a rich portrait of ancient women’s struggles.Pub Date: March 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798989557769
Page Count: 762
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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