More brilliant work from one of world literature’s greatest writers.
The third volume in Barker’s Trojan War series moves to Mycenae for a bloody climax.
Briseis, the enslaved Trojan princess who narrated the fall of Troy and ensuing wait for the Greeks to sail home in The Silence of the Girls (2018) and The Women of Troy (2021), is replaced here by Ritsa, a fellow Trojan who was her close friend. Ritsa is charged with babysitting Cassandra, daughter of the fallen King Priam, who is now enslaved to victorious Greek commander Agamemnon and proclaims that they will be killed in Mycenae. Indeed, readers soon meet Clytemnestra—in close third-person chapters alternating with Ritsa’s slave’s-eye first person—who is plotting to revenge herself on Agamemnon for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. But Ritsa’s master, Machaon, dismisses this idea: “Frightened? Of his wife?...She’ll jump if he tells her to.” Ritsa, as punchy a narrator as Briseis, voices the feminist critique central to all three novels in response. “Pure reflex that, an automatic assertion of the rights of men.” Barker’s use of blunt British vernacular to revive this ancient Greek tale remains as effective as ever. Her latest volume adds a new note to its predecessors’ grim catalogues of brutalities. It’s decidedly creepy; the palace rustles with the voices of invisible children who leave handprints and footprints that keep reappearing no matter how often they’re scrubbed off. They are the children Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, murdered and served in a pie to their father, his brother. But they are also “all the other little boys hurled to their deaths, the babies tossed into the air and caught on spears while their mothers were made to watch” as the victorious Greeks overran fallen Troy. Barker’s vision of a world shaped by violence, a key theme in all her fiction, is equal to the tragic grandeur of ancient myth, and her insistence that ordinary people’s sufferings be given equal weight with the woes of the mighty gives it a contemporary edge.
More brilliant work from one of world literature’s greatest writers.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780385549110
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
