A quietly effective novel that believably portrays Jewish life under Roman rule, the seeds of Christianity, and a woman’s...
A woman in first-century Palestine struggles to adapt, flourish, and find love and meaning.
This quasi-historical novel tells the story of Danya, who grows up in Nazareth during tumultuous times in Roman-occupied Palestine. Jewish rebels like her brother Lev fight to liberate their “sad, beautiful land,” impoverished by Roman taxation, while more prosperous Jews acquiesce. When the Romans seek retribution after a Jewish raid that the 13-year-old, self-educated Danya wanted to join, her father moves the family to Jerusalem to stay with her half brother, Chuza, for safety. After a Jewish uprising at the Temple Mount and a subsequent massacre by Roman forces, a Roman soldier kills Danya’s innocent father. Fourteen-year-old Danya is married off to an old Jewish priest, Tobiah, although she’s in love with a younger Jewish rebel, the real-life Judah ben Hezekiah, a “red-haired, roughly dressed leader of men.” She grows to love her conservative, aristocratic husband and bears him three children, suppressing her rebel sympathies in deference to his reluctant acceptance of Roman rule. When Tobiah dies unexpectedly, his estate goes to their oldest son, still a youth. Danya’s “avaricious, lustful, scheming” half brother plots to take advantage of the widow and her son and marry her teenage daughter. Along the way, Yeshua, the historical Jesus, and Miryam, his mother, intersect with Danya and her family. Thoroughly researched and perceptively written, this novel mainly presents interior relationships and feelings. Still, McGivern (Language Stories: Teaching Language to Developmentally Disabled Children, 1978) gives a convincing account of how families might have lived in first-century Palestine and of the troubling physical and psychological adjustments necessary for survival and in which practical considerations displace idealistic dreams. The author skillfully interweaves the lives of fictional and real-life characters to spin a convincing yarn and refrains from making the young Jesus too pious. The book succeeds in unearthing the Jewish roots of Christianity, embodied in the character of Danya, who is advised by Miryam to “act with love and compassion and justice.”
A quietly effective novel that believably portrays Jewish life under Roman rule, the seeds of Christianity, and a woman’s battles for survival.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 316
Publisher: WOW Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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