An entertaining Bronze Age soap-opera full of carnage, carnality, and a little hard-bitten philosophy.
Murder, war, conspiracies, religious antagonism, and holy harlotry roil ancient Sumeria in this historical novel.
Naoum’s saga unfolds in the city of Uruk on the Euphrates River during the bloody reign of King Sargon of Akkad, circa 2300 B.C. Life there revolves around power, sex, and the gods, as embodied in two institutions: the intrigue-filled court of the cruel, capricious Sargon (“Innocent, guilty—I don’t care. Execute! No mercy, execute!” reads a typical soliloquy) and the temple of Ishtar, goddess of love, and her popular cult of ritual sex work (her virgin acolytes must sell their bodies to any man who tosses them a “silver piece” before they can wed). A teeming cast of characters swirls through the hyperactive narrative, including Ibrahem, Sargon’s manipulative court sculptor, who maneuvers the king into killing the High Priest Ishullanu during a public sex ceremony honoring the god Anu. Then there’s Ibrahem’s son Isaa, a scribe who falls in love with Princess Enheduanna, Sargon’s daughter and an Ishtar follower. And there’s Mayram, a gorgeous temple sex worker who poses as a virgin to lure noblemen and kills them while they copulate (Ibrahem uses her to assassinate his and Sargon’s enemies). Larger developments occur during all the plotting and fornication, including a rebellion in the city of Ur and the rise of the monotheistic cult of Invisible One, which Isaa is drawn to. Backgrounding all the stabbings and beheadings is a sweeping, richly textured portrait of Mesopotamian culture, full of lore about everything from how to make a clay writing tablet to regional mythologies that feel like a polytheistic draft of Genesis.
The characters are vibrant if often grotesque—Sargon’s villainy is fearsome enough to merit a carved granite stele—and Naoum’s storytelling and prose are vigorous and evocative in their depictions of sex, violence, and splattery combinations of sex and violence. (“[H]e could only watch the blade plunge down into his chest…Mayram reached the peaks of ecstasy with the swell of his lust inside her and the burst of his lifeblood over her skin. Passionately, she closed her mouth on his, sucking out the last of his pleasure moans and silencing the groans of his death throes.”) In a deeper vein, the author explores characters’ religious feelings, which are sometimes plangent and heartfelt (“Tammara placed her daughter’s body in a jar that she sealed with bitumen. Every night, she would cradle the jar as she sang a sad melody, hoping that the goddess of the netherworld, Ereshkigal, would have pity on her, and by some miracle bring her baby back”) and sometimes cynical about the exploitation that theology justifies (“the rituals that reap the most profits are the ones that exploit the believers’ fears of the gods—drivel like, honor this god to keep the demons away…or the best of them all—a pilgrimage to some holy shrine is a must”). The result is a colorful if sometimes lurid period piece that will keep readers turning pages.
An entertaining Bronze Age soap-opera full of carnage, carnality, and a little hard-bitten philosophy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781733360739
Page Count: 642
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2024
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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