Readers who enjoy historical fiction and romance will find this a worthwhile journey.
Three women seek answers to their prayers at Rochemont Abbey, in this appealing novel set in the Dark Ages.
In a well-paced and interwoven story, Anthony’s (The Ruins of Lace, 2012) main characters relate their tales as they each face challenges of faith and hope for miracles. Sister Juliana left her lover and young daughter years ago and found refuge caring for Saint Catherine’s chapel and protecting the saint’s relic, which lies in a small casket. Disturbed by a promise she made to her dying mentor to assume leadership of the abbey, she’s racked with unresolved guilt about her past and doubts her ability to honor her promise. So she remains silent as another usurps control and plunders the pilgrims’ offerings and the chapel’s modest treasures. Anna is a young girl who has rarely ventured beyond her home due to her physical deformities. But now her mother’s death has left her homeless and destitute, and she desperately yearns to be healed. With no other possessions save her mother’s pendant and the clothes on her back, Anna begins her journey to Saint Catherine’s chapel. Abandoned by a group of pilgrims, she wanders into danger, and Godric, a sympathetic Saxon traveling with a group of Danes, becomes her protector. When Gisele learns her father, King Charles, has agreed to marry her off to a barbaric chieftain of the Danes to fulfill the terms of a treaty, the princess begs to travel to Saint Catherine’s relic to ascertain that the marriage is God’s will. Although her father decides to let her go, her plans are thwarted. She tries to enlist help from others, including the valiant knight who safeguards her, but she encounters unexpected problems, including wild animals and an uncooperative horse. The three women’s stories converge into a logical, though not necessarily happily-ever-after, closure, as Anthony creates a narrative that subtly educates, poses stimulating questions and entertains.
Readers who enjoy historical fiction and romance will find this a worthwhile journey.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8531-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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