A twist on angels and ministers of grace that feels more like a mercenary exercise than a fully fleshed-out adventure.
Three notorious villains protect a carpenter, his virgin wife and their newborn son as they flee the wrath of their Roman pursuers.
Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, 2010, etc.) hones his writing chops in this latest take on history’s mysteries, but the results lack the unabashed exuberance of his earlier work, despite a fair bit of swashbuckling. Here he tackles the New Testament, circling in on the Biblical Magi, the Three Wise Men from the Gospel of Matthew. The ringleader here is Balthazar, a hunted fugitive known far and wide as “The Antioch Ghost” for his slippery nature. Captured by a clever Roman captain, Balthazar is brought before mad Herod the Great to suffer for his crimes. In Herod’s dungeons, Balthazar meets kindred spirits Gaspar and his partner Melchyor, two swordsmen for hire. The trio exchange clothes with the real wise men and make their escape to Bethlehem, where they’re attacked with a pitchfork by Joseph and accused of blasphemy by the Virgin Mary. After this auspicious introduction, it’s a fast-paced dash across 200 miles of biblical geography to safety in Egypt. Grahame-Smith throws lots of obstacles in the path of his ragged band, including Balthazar’s tormented memories of his murdered brother, Herod’s approach to solving his messiah problem (the infamous Massacre of the Innocents) and a malevolent Magus with mystical powers and murderous ambition. And that’s before the walking dead (naturally) show up. It’s an interesting juxtaposition to place this anti-religious thief against this heavy religious backdrop—“Either I’m right and he doesn’t exist, or you’re right and he’s the kind of God who watches children die,” Balthazar scolds Mary. But while Grahame-Smith has already sold the script to Warner Brothers, the novel feels less cinematic than its inevitable movie adaptation.
A twist on angels and ministers of grace that feels more like a mercenary exercise than a fully fleshed-out adventure.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-56309-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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