Intellectually satisfying historical fiction that's also immensely entertaining.
In this final installment in the Guenevere trilogy (Knight of the Sacred Lake, 2000, etc.), Miles gives a provocative twist to the search for the Holy Grail—in a beautifully rendered and elegiac tale of betrayal, the passing of the old order, and the constancy of true love.
The principal characters of the Arthurian legend are soon assembled for this last chapter in the history of the Round Table and Camelot, the seat of the ancient matrilineal rulers of the Summer Country. Arthur is frail but as stubborn as ever, Guenevere still pines for Lancelot, and Mordred, Arthur’s son by the vindictive Morgan le Fay, is ready to assume his royal duties. But both Merlin and Guenevere are uneasy—change is in the air, and it threatens not only Arthur and his Knights, but Guenevere, too: the Christians want to end the worship of the Goddess and her followers who live beneath the Lake at Avalon, and Morgan, as always, is bent on revenge. When Lancelot returns unexpectedly from exile, Mordred, Arthur’s putative heir, is rejected by the Seat of Danger at the Round Table, reserved for “the most peerless knight in all the world,” and young Galahad arrives to claim his place. When Galahad, a devout Christian, sets off with Arthur’s blessing, and followed by all the Knights including Lancelot, to find the Holy Grail in Jerusalem, Arthur, ignoring Guenevere’s pleas, decides to build a far-flung Empire like that of Rome. Such hubris leads to the decimation of the Knights, the destruction of the Round Table itself, along with the glories that once were Camelot, as “fate spins its will.” Yet even so, Guenevere, the heroine of this feminist version of the legend, survives a near-burning at the stake, Arthur and Lancelot’s betrayal, and Mordred’s machinations, to find a sweet peace and love again as she rebuilds her kingdom, keeping alive the “golden dream.”
Intellectually satisfying historical fiction that's also immensely entertaining.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60624-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
