A meticulously researched and stirringly executed blend of historical fact and fiction.
A debut novel set in 14th-century France follows the plight of a woman accused of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church.
Bishop Jacques Fournier, notorious for his relentless persecution of suspected heretics, summons Béatrice de Lagleize for questioning. He’s convinced that she’s in some way involved with Cathars, a sect of heretics who don’t believe in sacramental transubstantiation and think that the devil created Earth and the bodies of human beings. Béatrice’s father was, in fact, a Cathar, and while she grew up in a noble family with the advantages that entails, she also matured under a cloud of suspicion. Terrified of Fournier after her first interrogation, she decides it’s best to flee rather than continue the inquisition, but she is arrested with her husband, Barthélemy. She’s thrown in a dungeon, her hair is forcibly shaved, and she’s subjected to seven more unyielding examinations, thrillingly rendered by Kaberry. In the meantime, Béatrice reflects deeply on the life she’s led and the way the stain of heresy has indelibly affected her. When only 16 years old, she was promised in marriage to Bérenger de Rocquefort, a much older man, because of his nobility and reputation for being a good Catholic. After she bears him five children in seven years and he dies, she remarries two more times. Yet the deaths of two husbands and a daughter exact a profound emotional toll on her and challenge her already beleaguered faith. She does her best to defend herself against Fournier’s accusations, but she’s been embedded in the Cathar world her whole life, sometimes as a distant sympathizer and sometimes as an accomplice. Kaberry seamlessly braids the historical and the dramatic, producing a work that is both scholarly and gripping. She paints a vividly grotesque picture of a monstrously corrupt Catholic Church, hated by many for its “greed, the extortionate taxes it demands, its debauched clergy.” However attractive or not Cathar doctrine is, it’s easy to see why subversive competitors of the church would arise. The author intelligently provokes questions about the relationship between authority and corruption—the Cathars, too, are capable of using theological doctrine as an instrument of self-aggrandizing dominion. Further, Béatrice is a beautifully drawn character—thoughtfully complex and deliciously enigmatic. While she is accused of doctrinal sedition, her real transgression is aching uncertainty about the details of her religion—and whether she can muster any faith at all: “She cannot hide her doubts and lies from herself or God, she can only be true to herself in her own mind. If there is a God, this most blasphemous of all thoughts worries her, can He see into her heart? Does He even care about her?” The plot’s pace can slow to a too leisurely amble, and the prose in some spots flirts with melodrama. Nonetheless, this is a captivating story, as emotionally moving as it is intellectually engaging.
A meticulously researched and stirringly executed blend of historical fact and fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78510-894-5
Page Count: 326
Publisher: FeedaRead.com
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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