A high-energy saga about love and betrayal filled with vibrant details about Roman history.
In this novel, a young Roman girl’s future becomes derailed when Emperor Nero impregnates her in C.E. 61.
Sixteen-year-old Antonia Plautina sets out for Rome, four years after giving birth to Nero’s child, with the intention of persuading the emperor to acknowledge the little girl that resulted from the night he assaulted her. Nero raped Antonia when he visited her father’s house when she was only 12. Antonia’s pregnancy and the illegitimate child have brought such shame to her household that her family has gradually lost everything. As a last resort, Antonia enlists the help of the clan’s former slave, Nikolaos, and travels to Rome to confront the emperor. When Nero learns about his child, he worries his enemies will try to use the girl against him somehow. To ensure his daughter’s safety, Nero orders Antonia to marry Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus, a middle-aged Celtic king, and to relocate with him to his homeland in Brittania. Worse yet, Togidubnus is already married to another woman he adores. When Togidubnus protests, the emperor simply declares the existing union void, marrying the new couple instantly. After enduring a harrowing boat ride to the island of Brittania, Antonia is disappointed by the comparatively primitive conditions awaiting her there, and Togidubnus is devastated by the rift that this new arrangement necessarily causes between him and his former wife, Breca. Antonia and Togidubnus must figure out a way to move forward as allies despite their distress at being stranded with each other. As Antonia and Togidbnus are dealt one blow after another, this action-packed tale should keep readers engaged. Finch (Myths, Metaphors, and Science Fiction, 2014, etc.) employs a straightforward prose and provides rich history about the Roman Empire during the first century, focusing especially on the reign of Nero and the control he extended far beyond Rome. The many specifics about Roman architecture, city planning, and inventions lend authenticity to the tale (Togidubnus “loved the new white temples, the tall buildings housing apartments and inns, the wide straight streets, the bustle and country smells of the markets—ripe cheese, garlic, sausage—the aqueducts bringing fresh mountain water to the city’s flowing fountains”). In addition, the narrative is chock full of timeless human emotions.
A high-energy saga about love and betrayal filled with vibrant details about Roman history.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9971188-3-4
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Hadley Rille Books
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
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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