Good, clean, intelligent fun—even the frequent anachronisms (e.g., ancient Romans exclaiming “Bloody marvelous!”) can’t...
The continuation of Scarrow’s Under the Eagle (2001) follows the adventures of Roman Centurion Macro as he defends himself against friend and foe alike during the invasion of Britain in A.D. 43.
Macro is one of those bright lads who rise to prominence out of nowhere, only to find he has to fight harder to stay on top than he did to get there in the first place. An illiterate soldier who rose through the ranks to become a centurion (i.e., commander of a division of a hundred men), Macro has learned that intrigue kills more officers than the barbarians ever could, and he has to keep a careful eye out for Vitellius, a senior tribune of the Second Legion who is a secret spy for Emperor Claudius. Macro and Vitellius have already crossed swords over an imperial payroll that Vitellius attempted to steal, but the aristocratic tribune is too well connected to be exposed outright—least of all by a plebian like Macro. So Macro keeps out of his way and concentrates on the first task at hand: the subjugation of the British tribes united under their warlord Caratacus. The Britons outnumber the Romans many times over, but they are no match for the Romans’ superior organization and strategy, and the conquest of their capital city Camulodunum (London) is only a matter of time. Once the victory is assured, however, a new danger arises when Vitellius attempts to overthrow Macro’s commander Vespasian, whose wife Flavia is connected with a secret society of republicans plotting to overthrow the emperor. The emperor, therefore, needs to return to Rome as soon as possible, put down the schemers in the senate, and have himself declared a god. In other words, politics as usual for the Roman Empire.
Good, clean, intelligent fun—even the frequent anachronisms (e.g., ancient Romans exclaiming “Bloody marvelous!”) can’t spoil the show. (N.B.: Caratacus escapes. Prepare for another installment.)Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-30533-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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
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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