I, Claudius it’s not. Still, Quinn handles Imperial Rome with panache.
The lives of an ambitious soldier, a patrician heiress and a future emperor fatefully intersect.
Ex-gladiator Vix, short for Vercingetorix (after Julius Caesar’s Gallic nemesis), has just returned to Rome. His parents, in the Roman equivalent of a witness-protection program for their role in the assassination of tyrannical Emperor Domitian, have retired to Britannia, where they have a villa and a garden. Vix seeks out the protection of his parents’ protector and co-conspirator, Senator Norbanus. Hired as a guard, Vix is enticed into the bed of Norbanus’ daughter Sabina, who at 18 has still not chosen a husband. After Sabina marries Hadrian, ward of the current Emperor Trajan, Vix joins the Tenth Legion and is off to Germania. When Hadrian and Trajan arrive to put down a barbarian rebellion, Sabina tags along, and is soon marching with the legions herself. Since Hadrian is preoccupied with male lovers, spirited Sabina is free to share the campfire and cot of Vix, forging convivial friendships with his comrades, including her former suitor Titus, a reluctant military tribune. Vix hopes to advance through the ranks despite his plebian status, but his only chance of making Centurion is to distinguish himself in battle: this he does by finding the weak spot of a fortress under siege, and killing the barbarian king. Promoted to aquilifer (bearer of the legion’s eagle standard), Vix’s joy is short-lived: His treasonous affair with Sabina is very nearly exposed. Hadrian’s meddling mentoress, the Empress Plotina, convinces Hadrian to curtail his wife's freedoms. Years later, Vix, on the verge of attaining his dream, Centurion-hood, returns to Rome, where Sabina remains under tight surveillance by Hadrian and the Empress. Titus advises Vix to steer clear, particularly if he wants to join Trajan’s next campaign of conquest in Parthia. However, soon Sabina, Vix and Titus dare to flout Hadrian, who, if Plotina’s schemes bear fruit, will occupy the imperial throne (and Quinn’s next book).
I, Claudius it’s not. Still, Quinn handles Imperial Rome with panache.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-425-24202-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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