An enjoyable escape read, sometimes undermined by frivolous scenes, with contemporary relevance and likable leads.
Fritsch’s unique twist on ancient Greece and early Rome offers more adventures of Timon, last surviving member of Troy’s royal family, and his companion, Lukas.
In Fritsch’s version of the Greek myth, Timon is son of Helen, the Spartan beauty, and Paris, the Trojan prince who brought her to Troy, which precipitated the Trojan War. After Paris was killed and Troy destroyed, Helen married Menelaus. They’ve reigned as king and queen of Sparta for the past 17 years. When they brought baby Timon to Sparta, they placed him in an orphanage to ensure his safety. He grew up with Lukas, his best friend, lover, and musical soul mate. Timon has only recently learned of his royal lineage. Now he and Lukas live together in the palace. Meanwhile, trouble is brewing in the fledging republic of Rome, populated two decades earlier by Trojan escapees. Former Trojan landowner Coriolanus, now commander of the Roman army and navy, sends his 18-year-old son, Marco, to Sparta to invite Timon, whose existence has recently become public, for a visit. In Rome, the three young men establish a ménage à trois, and Fritsch devotes considerable narrative space to their carefree, libidinous romps. Unfortunately, their frolicking, less poignant than the earlier novel’s Timon-Lukas love story, threatens to overwhelm the novel’s more intriguing underpinnings, which deal with political avarice and gender equality, the latter represented by the story’s strongest female character, Thalia, captain of her own merchant ship. Gradually, Timon realizes Coriolanus’ invitation was part of a plan to replace the republic with a monarchy. He intends to seize power during the upcoming senate elections, in which the “plebeians,” who now have the right to vote, have forced the patricians to run against Brutus, the populist hero. Readers will recognize Coriolanus’ scheme to overthrow the popular vote by violence as a haunting reminder of America’s current political climate and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Following the structure of his series opener, Fritsch hands over alternating narration to the three primary characters—Timon, Lukas, and Marco, giving the novel three distinct, engaging voices, although only Marco faces emotionally compelling conflict.
An enjoyable escape read, sometimes undermined by frivolous scenes, with contemporary relevance and likable leads.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2021
ISBN: 979-8985072600
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Asymmetric Worlds
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
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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