A gripping story, powerfully dramatic as well as historically instructive.
Brouwer’s historical novel imagines of the life of John, the son of Zebedee, the last disciple of Jesus.
In 62 AD, Jerusalem is riven by increasingly violent internecine conflict—Zealots, radical Pharisees and Sadducees, and bloodthirsty Sicarii all vie against each other and their Roman overseers for power. John, the youngest disciple of Jesus, is drawn into the fray when James, the leader of the Christian church in Jerusalem, is murdered by Ananus ben Ananus, a high priest and high-ranking Sadducee. Some radicals pushing for war, like Menahem ben Yehuda of the ultra-violent Sicarii, try to intimidate John into taking up arms. John is caught between the spiritual example of Jesus and the demands of worldly affairs, a tension sensitively evoked by the author: “At what point will I give up all this worldliness, Jesus? Why do I keep striving to change the world when I have not even changed my own heart? When I faced those men today, Lord, I had passionate, powerful thoughts, but my words did not reflect those thoughts. I felt stunted. The life of God within me has stagnated.” Before he died on the cross, Jesus charged John with taking care of his mother, Mary, but she implores John to travel away from Jerusalem and spread the word of her crucified son. Brouwer chooses a fascinating historical protagonist, one ripe for literary appropriation—John was the youngest and last of Jesus’s apostles, and, the author asserts, his gospel “struck the Christian world like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky.” There is little historical documentation of his life after Jesus’ death, a lacuna filled with novelistic opportunity. Brouwer impressively takes advantage of this, composing a tale both inventive and historically rigorous. For Christians and non-Christians alike, this is an engrossing narrative of faith during a time of political tumult.
A gripping story, powerfully dramatic as well as historically instructive.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2022
ISBN: 9798363117671
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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