A richly textured medieval tale told with gripping suspense, keen intelligence, and aching emotion.
The love story of Abelard and Heloise frames a tangled web of medieval intrigue and trauma in this labyrinthine novel.
Herin centers her tale on three historical figures in 12th-century France. They include Peter Abelard, a renowned scholastic philosopher and logician; Heloise, a teenage girl—and a formidable intellectual—whose affair with Abelard ended badly after they secretly married and her irate uncle hired men to castrate him; and Bernard of Clairvaux, a Roman Catholic mystic and founder of the Cistercian order of monks, who charged Abelard with heresy for his rationalistic analysis of Catholic theology. The narrative unfolds mainly in the 1130s, when Heloise has become the abbess of a nunnery, filled with regrets and yearning for Abelard. He is now the abbot of a monastery and trying to stage a comeback as a philosophy professor in Paris, an ambition Bernard is hoping to thwart by lobbying the church to ban him from teaching. The story also imagines Abelard’s youth as a brilliant, arrogant prodigy; Heloise’s as an equally brilliant, passionate girl; and Bernard’s as a sickly young man whose attempts to connect with the world end in migraines and frustration. As Abelard and Heloise wrangle with their pasts, their real-life son, Astrolabe—named by geeky Heloise after an astronomical instrument—sets out to find his parents, whom he hasn’t seen since infancy. Meanwhile, Brother Gauvain, a monk and master builder, investigates a series of murders that may be linked to Abelard and Bernard’s rivalry. The monk’s probe dredges up his youthful experiences as a crusader in Jerusalem, where he participated in the psychedelic rites of the Brotherhood of Saint Anthony, a secret society that may be behind the homicides and plots he is seeking to unravel.
Herin’s yarn weaves fact and fiction into an intricate tapestry that feels a bit like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose overlaid with Knights Templar–ish conspiracies and occult symbolism concerning everything from the magic number five to the titular serpent whose gaze turns men to stone. Around an entertaining mystery, she entwines a deep exploration of the intellectual and spiritual worldview of the Middle Ages, when Christian doctrine was awkwardly absorbing not-quite-logical medieval logic. (“Surely sir, you are not such an imbecile as to not know that universal substance is indivisible…the quality man passes wholly into each individual who thus become men by virtue of the divine substance,” asserts a celebrated brainiac.) Herin’s evocative prose vividly captures the horrific earthiness of medieval life and the mindset that found an ethereal holiness in it. (Out giving alms to dying peasants, Bernard “stared into an ancient and ghastly face, one cheek eaten away, the raw edges of flesh festering with pus and green mucous” and is reminded by his mother that “one learns to smell the sweet sanctity of Christ” in the stench of diseased flesh.) The author’s characters are devoutly religious, but she unearths the psychological tensions roiling beneath sacred rituals. (Receiving Holy Communion from Abelard, Heloise “came away amazed to have actually swallowed it, even as she felt the slight tremor of his fingers as they paused before her face to lay the crust of bread on her tongue.”) The result is an absorbing clash of love, faith, reason, and violence.
A richly textured medieval tale told with gripping suspense, keen intelligence, and aching emotion.Pub Date: April 30, 2022
ISBN: 9798986104904
Page Count: 658
Publisher: Wisdom House Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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