An ambitious but disjointed and hyperbolic historical novel.
Two stories separated by millennia unite in the famous buried city of Pompeii in Laudrigan’s novel.
This book is constructed as a narrative within a narrative. In the present day, Titch, a narrator who shares the author’s name, describes his acquisition and painstaking reconstruction and translation of scrolls that were recovered from a villa north of Pompeii. The contents of those scrolls constitute the book’s inner narrative: the life story of a soldier and thief named Mago who lived through several signature events in the reigns of the Roman emperors Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula. This text by Mago is burned and corrupted, making it a nonchronological challenge for Titch; it’s further complicated by Mago’s tendency to skip the narrative around to points over a long span of Roman history, with Titch industriously inserting parenthetical explanations for the many details that Mago mentions. The story, of course, marches inexorably toward the natural disaster that will end Mago’s story forever. Laudrigan’s novel is intriguingly multilayered, and the narrative makes effective use of the one element every reader will already know: the famous eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum nearly 2,000 years ago. The book’s liberal sprinkling of Latin among the historical accounts is likewise engaging. However, its narrative voice comes in a rush of rambling, tangled prose, and readers may often find themselves bewildered: “It is not of your behavior this day I want to inquire, of that I already know,” says one character, going on to elaborate: “It is something of your Gods I wish answered, a piqued considered interest, merely an opinion needed to sate a rapacious curiosity and moreover, something I can get further information at another time.” Such excessive overwriting slows the momentum of the plot as effectively as an eruption of ash.
An ambitious but disjointed and hyperbolic historical novel.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-66290-175-1
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
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