An engaging, elegantly narrated collection of tales that manages to make history feel personal.
In this collection of stories, an older King Edward I of England reminisces about the tragedies, loves, and battles that hardened him over the years.
The year is 1307, and the once formidable King Edward I is near death. He visits Marjory, the 11-year-old daughter of Scottish freedom fighter Robert the Bruce, in her cage at the Outer Court of Lanercost Priory in northern England. He has imprisoned her there as punishment for her father’s rebellion, but the two quickly form an odd sort of bond as he spends days regaling her with stories of his youth. Each of the collection’s 27 tales—beginning with the boyhood of the king’s father, Henry Plantagenet, in 1216 and concluding with a friend’s dire warning that Edward’s legacy is at stake if he continues pursuing the Scottish rebels—fills in pieces of the monarch’s personal and public life. From his deep love for Queen Eleanor to the brutal murder of his cousin Hal and Edward’s fatal flaw at the Battle of Lewes that resulted in a major setback in the bloody civil war led by Simon de Montfort, readers slowly discover what led to the king’s descent into cruelty—as well as Marjory’s eventual fate. Smith readily admits that her stories, while historically based, are largely fictional. This creative freedom results in a book that examines a dense swathe of history in an approachable way, sparking a mixture of both sympathy and repulsion for Edward. And even with the limited plot given to her in the frame story, the plucky Marjory manages to shine. While the prose can become dense in places, its vividness consistently brings history alive (“At night, the streets of London were extremely dangerous. Only rats, mongrels, and madmen dared to venture out alone”). The volume also includes helpful footnotes to explain unfamiliar terms. Smith ultimately presents a thoughtful examination of love, loyalty, and the legacies that mortals leave behind.
An engaging, elegantly narrated collection of tales that manages to make history feel personal.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798324489366
Page Count: 562
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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