A historical novel about a Spanish conquistador’s invasion of Guatemala as narrated by three witnesses: a Mayan prince, the conquistador’s wife and a Dominican monk.
In 1524, Pedro de Alvarado entered Guatemala looking for riches; by 1529, he’d subdued the region, largely through wanton atrocities. This novel covers the period from Alvarado’s arrival through his death in 1541. The first narrator is Belehé, who tells the story of being a prince of the local Kaqchikel tribe and a longtime captive of the rival K’iché people. After he’s released, he rejoins his tribe, which is now allied with Alvarado against the K’iché. But the Spaniard’s excesses eventually lead the Kaqchikel to revolt and flee into the highlands. Belehé tells of the years just before and after Alvarado’s arrival, using the symbol-laden imagery of a culture with mysterious gods, and describes the destruction of his homeland in lyrical language (“And when they came, I was frightened, oh, my sons!...They came to warn us of the arrival of the gods”). The second narrator is Beatriz, Alvarado’s wife, whose tale is set during her husband’s governorship of Guatemala. As Spanish nobility, she looks down upon the natives while still recognizing their humanity. Her initial love for Alvarado turns to disgust as she sees what sort of man he is in the New World. The last narrator is Brother Domingo, whose superior, Father Bartolomé, is on a holy mission to convert the local natives. Domingo, torn between the duties of his faith and his own earthly needs, relates the last years of Alvarado’s life as the conquistador goes farther afield in search of glory and gold. Vlach, a practicing psychologist, has clearly done his research for this debut novel; the historical detail is impressive and the settings are vivid and realistic. However, the story doesn’t effectively build toward any sort of climax, which is unfortunate, given the rich material. There are also a few minor slip-ups: Meters are used as measures of distance about 150 years too early, the passage of time is hard to gauge, and the Spanish political situation could have been clearer.
An often enthralling look into a little-known period of history, but one that lacks the dramatic structure for maximum impact.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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