STONEHENGE

Name: STONEHENGE
Author: Bernard Cornwell
ISBN: 0-06-019700-5

by Bernard Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2000

Whatever the period, count on Cornwell to serve up the details on which verisimilitude thrives. Lots of that here, maybe...

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An acclaimed historical novelist (Sharpe's Triumph, 1999, etc.) casts a canny eye way, way back.

It's 2000 b.c., and the old ways—and the old gods—seem somehow less controlling than they used to be. Even Hengall, the once tyrannical chief in Ratharryn, appears unusually vulnerable, and his oldest son, sensing this, is on the point of challenging his authority. Hengall has three sons: Camaban, whom he’s ashamed of because he was born club-footed; Saban, whom he favors but who, at age 12, is a nonplayer, politically speaking, and Lengar, who is the tribe's great warrior and hunter. Obviously, then it’s the latter who will have to be killed if Hengall’s to stay alive. The power struggle mounts in intensity, complicated by the existence of nearby marauding bands in Cathalla and far-flung ones in Semennyn. And as men betray and murder each other, the wayward gods watch—ever in need of placating, usually by human sacrifice. Camaban, written off, startles all by becoming a first-class sorcerer-visionary and later point-man for a new religion, one that will award ascendancy to Slaol, the sun god, who in turn will end winter, eliminate death, and generate better behavior among humans. A new temple must be built in his honor, Camaban insists, the likes of which has never been seen before, a circle of magnificently massive stones and boulders—never mind that nothing of this description is indigenous to Ratharryn. Camaban has his way. Saban, the youngest of the brothers, grows old building a Slaol-worthy edifice; but when it’s finished, the men are still up to their old tricks: betrayal, murder, the usual.

Whatever the period, count on Cornwell to serve up the details on which verisimilitude thrives. Lots of that here, maybe more than required, but it's a sturdy story, too—an ancient sibling rivalry full of enough blood and thunder to hold anyone's interest.

Pub Date: June 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-06-019700-5

Page Count: 432

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

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by Kristin Hannah

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‘The Nightingale’ Is Reese’s Book Club Pick

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THE NICKEL BOYS

by Colson Whitehead ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 16, 2019

Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...

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Awards & Accolades

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17

Our Verdict

GET IT

Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2019

Kirkus Prize
winner

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Critics Circle Finalist

Pulitzer Prize Winner

The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.

Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.

Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.