An informative but often plodding tale that’s more likely to appeal to history buffs than casual readers.
Kreis’ (The Labyrinth, 2014) historical novel explores the dangers and rewards of Colonial North America, as seen through the eyes of a Puritan woman.
This book follows Lizzie Price as she moves from a settlement in Deerfield, Massachusetts, to Native American camps to the bustling city of Montreal over the course of her eventful life. She moves from Northampton to Deerfield with her family at the age of 13 but becomes unhappy with the trappings of a Puritan lifestyle. She resists her community’s disdain for fun, as well as its emphasis on marriage; instead, she’d rather read her secretly obtained books or take a swim at her secret place in the Deerfield River. She’s in danger of being labeled a spinster at 19 when she begins a romance with Andrew Stevens, also known as “Skagit,” a fur trader who, as a child, was taken from his settler family by Native Americans. However, the couple’s happiness is short-lived. Soon after Andrew changes his lifestyle to become respectable enough to marry Lizzie, Native Americans raid Deerfield. They rip Lizzie away from her new husband and kill or capture most of her family and her fellow Deerfield residents. Lizzie’s Native American master eventually entrusts her to the care of Catholic nuns in Montreal; there, she must try to put her broken community back together and decide what the trajectory of her life will be. Kreis’ historical research comes through clearly in this novel, which shows various aspects of daily Colonial life in great detail and offers maps to provide context for the characters’ travels. He also paints clear pictures of various Colonial locations, and readers, who may only be familiar with famous Colonies such as Plymouth and Jamestown, will appreciate its broader glimpse into pre-revolutionary North America. However, there are occasional passages that uncomfortably focus on teenage characters’ sexual development—specifically Lizzie’s. Readers may also find themselves quickly overwhelmed by the novel’s ponderous length and large cast of characters.
An informative but often plodding tale that’s more likely to appeal to history buffs than casual readers.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1505678925
Page Count: 418
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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