With torture and swordplay, there’s more (lowercase) gore than Washington generally offers and more fun than most readers...
A writer known for his satires of Washington, D.C., takes aim at religion in 16th-century Europe, where a relics trader is forced to steal one of Catholicism’s most coveted objects.
Buckley (But Enough About You, 2014, etc.) roams far from his usual inside-the-Beltway turf while tilting at earlier establishment types in this comic historical novel, his 16th book. In the year 1517, Dismas is the Relic Master at the high end of the holy-bone trade for two competing collectors, Frederick of Saxony and Albrecht of Mainz. When Dismas learns that his nest egg has been smashed by a Bernie Madoff precursor, he agrees to a scheme that depends on Albrecht’s envy of Frederick’s larger collection. But Dismas and his partner in crime, the German painter Dürer, are caught trying to pull the linen over Albrecht’s eyes with a fake shroud—Christ’s burial cloth—and the result is a penance compelling Dismas to steal the “real” shroud, “the most closely guarded relic in Christendom.” What ensues might be pitched Hollywood-style as The Princess Bride meets Ocean’s XIII. Dismas, Dürer, and three German mercenaries navigate a string of mishaps and brothels and rescue a beautiful damsel only to find themselves competing with another shroud thief. Buckley finds easy targets with the rampant abuses in relics, which make money off the laity’s guilt and gullibility. Dismas has heard of a dozen foreskins from the infant Jesus and enough arrows from the perforation of St. Sebastian “to supply the entire Roman army.” The writer also works in the contemporaneous rise of Martin Luther and the campaign he was able to wage against such abuses under the curious protection of Frederick, the great relic collector.
With torture and swordplay, there’s more (lowercase) gore than Washington generally offers and more fun than most readers might expect even from twisted history.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2575-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
