An entertaining sword-and-politics saga full of engrossing period detail and sharp drama.
Ancient Rome boils with sordid power plays, constant intrigue, full moon rituals, and eruptions of bloodshed in Eckert’s sprawling historical novel.
The author paints a panorama of the Roman Empire in the year 193, starting with the murder of the vile Emperor Commodus by Laetus, commander of the Praetorian Guard, after the leader attempts to rape Laetus’ betrothed. Pertinax is promptly elected emperor by the Senate, and he proves modest and competent but also impolitic and stingy; after he fails to pay the city watchmen their customary bribes, he’s unceremoniously stabbed to death. The Praetorians then massacre the city watch, sell the emperorship to one Didius Julianus for 25 gold pieces per Guardsman, and force the Senate to vote him in at spearpoint. The loathed and inept Julianus tries everything to keep his shaky hold on power, including drinking the blood of a rabbit sacrificed to the goddess Hecate. But powerful rivals—the governors of Britannia and Egypt; the rough-hewn general Septimius Severus—soon try to overthrow him with their legions. Throughout the upheavals, Eckert’s narrative focuses on the household of Sen. Marcus Tullius, his daughter Tullia, and those they’ve enslaved as they navigate a time when a careless comment could get one branded an emperor’s enemy. As it portrays real events (with a few embellishments), Eckert’s tale steeps readers in all things Roman—from wedding ceremonies to military drills to Rome’s traffic jams—and ably dissects a society structured around complex hierarchies and in which survival requires currying favor with the powerful; even casual conversations and actions are calculated for advantage. The author’s vivid, nuanced prose conveys the subtle tensions that besiege his characters as well as the brutality that awaits those who incorrectly parse them: “I order that his lying tongue be torn out by the roots, and that he be hung by his hands from a bar and flogged until death,” declares a judge of the loser in a lawsuit. The result is a captivating page-turner.
An entertaining sword-and-politics saga full of engrossing period detail and sharp drama.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2022
ISBN: 9781667873176
Page Count: 801
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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