Stuffed with slaughter, sweat and viscera.
Muscular, blood-and-guts sequel to Barone’s first novel (Dawn of Empire, 2006) finds the fourth-century BCE Mesopotamian settlement of Akkad besieged by Egyptian marauders.
Familiar from the first work, Akkad (formerly Orak), a newly rejuvenated city thanks to the impermeable wall built by the warrior Eskkar and his former slave, now-pregnant wife Lady Trella, is still perilously perched on the banks of the Tigris, and at the mercy of roving bandits envious of its prosperity. In this novel, brave, humane leader Eskkar sets out for a several months’s mission to neighboring settlements of Dilgarth and Bisitun to clear the land of bandits and protect the farmers and herders who supply Akkad with its food and trade. However, Egyptian bandit leader Korthac has dragged what’s left of his fighting force across the desert in search of this legendary city, and he plans to take it by force and instill himself as its leader. Eskkar rides off with his best fighting men for Dilgarth and discovers that the marauders have recently brutalized the village, killing the men and raping the women; he establishes himself there as the benevolent savior, regaining the trust of the people. He retakes Bisitun by force, routing its corrupt tyrant Ninazu in a bloody battle. Once Eskkar is absent from Akkad, however, Korthac moves in, presenting himself as a trader in gems to Lady Trella, who is suspicious and has him spied on. The action alternates between different camps: In Bisitun, Eskkar accepts the sensuous hospitality of the comely widow Lani, and he grows reluctant to return home. Meanwhile, Korthac and his minions seize their chance, taking the undefended Akkad by storm and Lady Trella as prisoner. After his rather feminist first work, in which Lady Trella assumed a noble, fighting role, this book introduces the troublesome themes of Eskkar’s adultery and abandonment of wife and home—correctible in the end, perhaps, but disappointing.
Stuffed with slaughter, sweat and viscera.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-089246-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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