As much fun as its predecessors: a simple adventure, good pacing, a light touch, and a genuine feel for the period.
Turtletaub (The Gryphon’s Skull, 2002, etc.) continues the adventures of Menedemos and Sostratos, the ancient Greeks who here journey into the unknown reaches of Phoenicia on a business trip that, as usual, turns out to involve more than buying and selling.
Menedemos and Sostratos, as earlier readers will recall, are cousins from the island of Rhodes (sons of the wealthy merchant brothers Philodemos and Lysistratos) who serve as advance men for the family business, skippering their ship Aphrodite into the farthest-flung ports to peddle and acquire the rarest goods they can find for the best markets. Menedemos, the sailor, is as daring and aggressive as his scholarly cousin Sostratos cool and shrewd. So how is it, this time around, that they agreed to take a cargo of olive oil to Phoenicia (a bit like bringing bananas to Costa Rica)? As a favor to an in-law, basically—but they don’t expect the trip to be a wash. Sostratos has heard that a region of Phoenicia deep inland (Ioudaia) produces the best balsam in the world and can be sold for a fortune in the perfume markets of Greece. Everyone warns the two that the Ioudaians are tough customers, but, as Sostratos sees it, a merchant’s job is to turn aggravation into silver. He also, not coincidentally, wants very badly to observe the customs of these remote and little-known people. He sets off while Menedemos remains in port, where he tries to find a customer for his useless cargoes in those spare moments when he’s not seducing other men’s wives. Though as wily as Odysseus when on their home turf, Menedemos and Sostratos now begin to fear that the barbarians may get the better of them.
As much fun as its predecessors: a simple adventure, good pacing, a light touch, and a genuine feel for the period.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30037-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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