A historically provocative and dramatically riveting tale.
A debut novel offers a literary reimagining of Jesus’ life and ministry from the perspectives of those who encounter him.
Darmud has no pretensions about his moral standing: “I knew I was a worm.” An incorrigible womanizer beset by greed, he establishes a prostitution ring in Alexandria, but his Uncle Alexander Lysimachus exiles Darmud when he discovers it. Alexander sends his nephew to Jerusalem to work for his friend Eleizer, a Pharisee and member of the powerful Sanhedrin. Eleizer tasks Darmud with vigilantly following Jesus, the “upstart Jewish teacher who thinks he’s a prophet.” The Sanhedrin fear that Jesus’ mounting popularity will be interpreted by the Roman authorities as the beginnings of a political insurgency and that they will tighten their control of the Jewish State as a result. Meanwhile, Mariamme of Sepphoris, a traveling tradeswoman, is falsely accused of adultery and dragged out into the streets of Jerusalem to be stoned to death. But Jesus intervenes and prevents the mob from satisfying its lust for violent punishment. She meets Darmud in Magdala, and the two become romantically involved, but he’s only interested in her as an instrument of carnal satisfaction and a potential source of information regarding Jesus. Later on, encouraged by her friend Nainah and servant, Amos, she attends some of Jesus’ sermons and becomes a devoted follower. But Judas Iscariot objects to her proximity to Jesus, especially after hearing the lascivious rumors Darmud spreads about her in an effort to sully her reputation. Harris chronicles Jesus’ ministry up until his resurrection, shifting deftly from one first-person narration to the next. Readers are treated to the impressions of a slave, a blind man granted his sight by Jesus, and notable biblical figures like Judas and Pontius Pilate, among others. The author’s dramatic interpretation of the New Testament is meticulously faithful to the historical record but also artistically inventive. She has a gift for the nuanced construction (and reconstruction) of authentic characters. Harris delicately depicts Judas’ internal struggle on the way to his betrayal of Jesus and the profound remorse he experiences when he realizes precisely what he’s engineered: “My heart stopped beating. At that moment I saw what would happen, and what I had done. I had brought it about. My cursed desire to please everyone, and to be everyone’s darling, my pride, my self-imposed isolation, my intellectual arrogance, my touchy dignity.” Darmud, too, is intriguingly cynical—while some see a savior in Jesus, he only perceives an “enigmatic, misleading, and slippery” con man, and he’s incapable of thinking otherwise: “I was out to find a sinister motive in Jesus and by damn I was going to find one.” The author allows herself some fantastical literary devices, which are powerfully employed, like the personification of fear and the “Powers of Darkness.” The entire novel reads like an espionage thriller and manages to unfurl with crackling suspense despite the conclusion’s being historically foregone. This is an exceedingly intelligent re-creation of a story so familiar such an authorial feat should not be possible.
A historically provocative and dramatically riveting tale.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4808-0991-8
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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