An often deft blend of emotional drama and historical reconstruction.
A sister and brother are orphaned and separated when war arrives at their Judean village in this novel of the ancient world.
In 135 B.C.E., Keziah, who’s not yet a teenager, lives in precarious circumstances: Her mother has leprosy, a disease that the family hides from their fellow villagers, and nearby Jerusalem is under siege by Greeks from the Seleucid Empire. One day, Keziah returns home to find her house on fire, and she witnesses the savage murders of both her parents and her younger brother, Moshe; her neighbors had discovered her family’s dark secret. A kind Iturean trader and a shopkeeper help her escape death, and she makes her way to Galilee, where she has family. Meanwhile, her older brother, Joazar, is taken captive by the Greek invaders and is made the servant of Jugurtha, who was once enslaved but is now the head of the treasury. Jugurtha attempts to school Joazar in what he sees as the ways of the world—a bottomless cynicism that profoundly challenges Joazar’s faith, as Potter eloquently depicts: “The ease with which he discarded childhood superstitions was proof of something he chose not to name.” The author’s research is impeccable over the course of the novel, although there’s an occasional tendency to bombard the reader with minute details of the day’s political conflicts. However, his prose can also turn leaden and grave, almost as if it’s meant to be carved in marble: “Humankind’s role was simple: skirt the attention of the gods, seek their clemency or succour only as much as needed, and revel in as much godlike madness as circumstance allowed. The only difference between slave and king was means.” Nonetheless, this is a magisterial work of ancient worldbuilding, and a dramatically affecting one, as well, as both siblings struggle to repair their broken lives—Keziah takes solace in a new family and her musical talent while Joazar desperately looks for her—and their desire for peace is repeatedly frustrated.
An often deft blend of emotional drama and historical reconstruction.Pub Date: March 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77730-732-5
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Paper Stone Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2021
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
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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