A theologically perceptive and dramatically enthralling work of historical reconsideration.
A novel reimagines the life of Judas and his relationship with Jesus.
Nearly everyone knows the biblical story of Judas’ perfidy—he handed over Jesus to his enemies for 30 pieces of silver. Turner bases his thoughtful dramatization of the life of Judas—Youdias in the novel—on a tantalizingly original conceit: that he composed a suicide note before taking his own life. The book is this note, an explanation of the manner in which he met his spiritual master, Yeshua (Jesus), whose ideas he finds “exhilaratingly novel.” Unfortunately, Youdias has nothing but contempt for Yeshua’s “uncouth band” of disciples, a sheepish tribe of ignorant peasants. Youdias becomes obsessed with convincing Yeshua not only to explicitly assume the mantle of the Messiah, but also the Son of David and fashion himself a political liberator of Israel. As far as Youdias is concerned, only a revolution will spread Yeshua’s ideas: “We must fight fire with fire.” Yeshua, though, is committed to “nonviolent resistance” and opposes a reduction of his mission to worldly terms. When Youdias learns of a plot to assassinate Yeshua, he contacts Natan, an aristocratic priest. Youdias pretends to conspire against Yeshua in order to force his master’s hand in declaring himself the Son of David. In this illuminating book, the author doesn’t waste the novel’s inventive premise, painting a vivid picture of Yeshua’s charismatic ministry and the complex spirituality of his message. In addition, Youdias is intelligently portrayed as arrogantly confident of his own opinions but finally tortured by doubts that his scheme is prudent: “I was not at all sure that even the instinct for self-preservation would be enough for Yeshua to take up arms if he had not heard from his Abba. Might he not simply surrender and take on the role of the Suffering Servant?”
A theologically perceptive and dramatically enthralling work of historical reconsideration.Pub Date: July 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5326-8601-6
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Resource Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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