This chilling tale of religious persecution is served up with a feminist bite.
On an icy, dark island, men hunt witches and women fight back.
British poet and playwright Hargrave plucks a piece of 400-year-old legal history—a European king’s prosecution of 91 people for witchcraft—and gives it a feminist spin. The story opens in 1617 in the Arctic Circle, with a historic, strangely sudden storm off the island of Vardø. Maren, 20, has run to the harbor as her father, brother, and fiance founder in boats at sea. “All about her, other mothers, sisters, daughters are throwing themselves at the weather: dark, rain-slick shapes, clumsy as seals.” Forty men drown in the Christmas Eve storm, leaving their Norwegian womenfolk in a treeless village, sunk in winter darkness. The women winch the men’s corpses off the rocks, up the cliffs, and store them in a boathouse; the ground is far too frozen to breach. They butcher reindeer and, after much dissention, split over the radical step of going to sea to fish for themselves. News reaches the authorities, who send first a preacher, then someone more sinister, Scotsman Absalom Cornet, who has already executed a woman for witchery. He brings a bewildered new wife, Ursa, a young city woman, ignorant of her husband’s history. She forms a fast, unlikely bond with Maren. To Absalom, the lethal storm seems suspiciously supernatural and the customs of the local Laplanders—Sámi people—an abomination. The tension ratchets across the novel’s three sections: “Storm,” “Arrival,” and “Hunt.” The women—divided, watchful, unlettered, and bereaved—are prey, but they are not helpless. In clean, gripping sentences the author is wonderfully tuned to the ways and gestures of a seemingly taciturn people. “Even writing at a distance of four hundred years, I found much to recognize,” she states in her historical note. “This story is about people, and how they lived; before why and how they died became what defined them.”
This chilling tale of religious persecution is served up with a feminist bite.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-52925-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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