The ending’s too nice for the guts-and-gore theme of the rest of the book, but the author ties up most loose threads and...
A midwife in the palace of Sultan Murat III helps a poor Jewish harem girl in Rich’s follow-up to The Midwife of Venice (2012).
In 16th-century Constantinople, Venetian exiles Hannah and Isaac Levi traverse the sometimes-treacherous streets and work to sustain themselves and their son. Isaac’s opened a silk workshop, and Hannah continues to ply her trade as a midwife. When she’s summoned to the palace by the sultan’s formidable mother, the Valide Nurbanu, Hannah’s tasked with examining a young girl whom the Valide wishes to present to her son as a gift. The Valide hopes newly acquired Leah will produce a strong heir and entice the sultan to forget his favorite wife, Safiye. After her village was pillaged and razed by marauders, feisty Leah, a Venetian Jew like Hannah, was taken captive and eventually sold into servitude. Hannah pities the girl and lies to the Valide to prevent Leah from being sent to a brothel. Hannah knows by doing so she’s risking her life, but she comes up with a risky ruse to conceal the lie. Back in Venice, when Isaac’s brother dies, a household maid assumes his widow Grazia’s identity and sails to Constantinople to carry out an elaborate scheme. With encouragement from a fellow conspirator, she refines the plot and, upon arriving in Constantinople, is welcomed and offered shelter by Hannah and Isaac. As Hannah again risks her family and friends to assist Leah, she develops reservations about her sister-in-law and worries about her marriage, her husband’s business and her status with the Valide. She’s prepared to die for her actions, but she doesn’t anticipate events that threaten the family's stability and result in an unexpected ally. Rich embellishes her tale with graphic descriptions of life and death in Venetia and Constantinople during this era, and although her depictions are sometimes unpleasant to imagine, they add to the intrigue.
The ending’s too nice for the guts-and-gore theme of the rest of the book, but the author ties up most loose threads and delivers an enthusiastic effort. This earthy account will please Rich fans.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1280-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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