A lively and intriguing tale about polytheistic Sumerian society; sexually explicit, with a surprise ending.
A debut novel offers a story about ancient palace intrigue, inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The author opens this Sumerian tale with Gaga, the court jester, entertaining the cruel King Sargon. Gaga sings a blasphemous version of the beginnings of humankind at a pre-coronation gathering of noblemen. When the priest En-shakush and Gaga argue, Sargon orders both to their knees and tells his henchman Naplanam to choose which one to behead. Relishing the fear emanating from the two men, Naplanam takes his time, which Sargon enjoys while chomping on pomegranate seeds: “It was good…to make” all present “think twice about betraying him.” Plots and subplots abound among the multitude of characters. Ibrahem, the king’s sculptor, was cheated by the high priest Ishullanu out of final payment for his likeness of “the great god Anu.” Ibrahem convinces Sargon that the monarch is the true representative of the deities and that Ishullanu is plotting to overturn him. Soon, Enheduanna, Sargon’s virgin daughter, who is secretly involved with Isaa, Ibrahem’s son, learns that her father has promised her to the pharaoh. She and Isaa plan for her to lose her virginity (his also, it turns out) in "a ritual" honoring Ishtar, goddess of love. The polytheism practiced is highly sexual, as in the spring equinox festival, a celebration during which the high priest plays the role of god and plunges “his mighty plow…into the virgin earth” (a virgin selected for the ritual). Ishullanu, unable to perform, tries to fake copulation but is exposed and disgraced when the crowd angrily demands that he “show the plow...!” The last third of the engaging novel deftly connects the stories of the principal characters and ultimately delivers an unpredictable conclusion. The author’s pseudonym is the same name as the 13th-century B.C.E. scribe who compiled the Epic of Gilgamesh ("I just hope that Sin Leqi Unninni would forgive me for plagiarizing parts of his epic story…and his name"). Vivid imagery and courtly formal dialogue, often followed by the characters’ thoughts, bring both the players and the period to life, as in this passage where Ibrahem meets a local merchant: “ ‘Gudea!’ Ibrahem exclaimed in greeting, his face chiseled into an expression of happy surprise that hid his distaste.” But many readers may find themselves squirming at some of the graphic descriptions of torture.
A lively and intriguing tale about polytheistic Sumerian society; sexually explicit, with a surprise ending.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73336-070-8
Page Count: 754
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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
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
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