A fictional reconstruction of Roger Williams’ fight (and flight) for religious freedom in 17th-century England and New England.
In this historical novel, debut author Irizarry traces the steps of the founder of Providence from his childhood in England to his life in Massachusetts and his eventual travel to Rhode Island to escape religious persecution. (The novel chronicles many people and places, but Williams’ life is the thread that ties the story together.) As a smart lad in London, he learns a secret form of shorthand to carry messages from imprisoned religious separatists and, later, to record parliamentary proceedings for a London lawyer and mentor, Sir Edward Coke. Williams grows up to become a minister, hoping someday to preach Christianity to Native Americans. Although he finds himself in opposition to the ruling religious and civil powers, he learns to make connections and compromises. In 1631, he migrates to Massachusetts with his wife, but his religious beliefs soon put him in conflict with Puritan orthodoxy. He flees a court summons, escaping into the frozen wild, where he’s saved by Indians. Eventually, he reaches Narragansett Bay, where he’d purchased the use of land from the Narragansett tribe. Other religious dissidents join him and help found alternative faiths in a community based on religious tolerance. The book ends with an imaginary Q&A between a 21st-century interlocutor and Williams about modern subjects, such as gay marriage. This well-researched novel provides fine portraits of Williams and his contemporaries, and of a crucial but often overlooked chapter in American history. It offers multiple viewpoints—including those of a Puritan, a dissident, and a Narragansett, among others—and some powerful passages: “We are the people of the ages,” a young Nipmuc brave tells Roger. “We came before, and we will stay after.” However, the book could have used more and better physical descriptions of its people and places. The prose also has other weaknesses, including needless explanation (“This was not a good situation,” the narrator notes after John Winthrop the Younger is captured by Pequots) and sometimes-anachronistic narrative language and dialogue—“How’s the missus?” Williams asks a friend—that detract from the otherwise authentic-sounding historical tone.
An uneven novel that nevertheless provides an accessible introduction to an overlooked hero and the birth of religious freedom in the North American colonies.Pub Date: May 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5049-1123-8
Page Count: 488
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PROFILES
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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