An intricately detailed but emotionally flat novel set in early medieval Ireland.
A monk and an upstart king take on a tyrant in De Fougerolles’ latest historical novel in a series.
Columba, a long-exiled abbot and prince, has returned to his native Ireland. For years, he has lived on the Scottish isle of Iona, building a monastery; now he’s come back home, where he’s at the side of his old friend, Aedan mac Gabran, who reigns as the new king of the united Dal Riatas, a small state that spans the channel between Scotland and Ireland. Aedan’s come to make war on an old enemy—the overking of Ulaid, Baetan mac Cairell, who currently holds both of Aedan’s wives and one of his sons hostage. Aedan’s grip on the fractious Dal Riata is tenuous: “As I see it, you seek to unite, if you can, rather than to divide,” Columba advises Aedan. “That is a noble pursuit, a virtue in anyone….Whether you can unite here, we can only wait and see. But you must act; you know you must.” In order to win allies to their cause, Columba and Aedan must install a teenager, imprisoned by Baetan mac Cairell, on the throne of a nearby kingdom.At the same time, they’re desperate to learn the fate of Eogan mac Gabran, Aedan’s brother who was recently kidnapped by rogue monks. The two quests will take the friends through the petty kingdoms of northern Ireland, negotiating a complex political system involving warlords, abbots, and kings. At the same time, a plague has arrived from the continent and is slowly creeping north across the island. Can Aedan and Columba hold their weakened federation together long enough to defeat a tyrant? It will take all their bravery and cunning—and perhaps a bit of help from Columba’s God.
Historian de Fougerolles displays a deep understanding of the nuances of ancient Irish society, offering readers a blend of Gaelic cultural practices and insular Christian theology. Here, for example, Columba explains in detail how a petty king might beneficially cultivate a monastery on his lands: “Being dicenn—being kinless, or ‘headless’, as they say—the exiled Christian may apply to the lord of the strange land in which they find themselves, to petition that he take them under his protection….For, in law, as you know, the king of a tuath is responsible—can choose to be responsible—for a kinless man.” This loving attention to history is offset, though, by a relative lack of development when it comes to characters’ psychology. There’s plenty of scheming and oath-swearing, but readers may have trouble finding very much to care about in these men and women, in part because so many of their motivations are rooted in their cultural moment. The author does her best to make the material accessible—there are plenty of maps, a glossary, a timeline, and a guide to pronouncing the many unintuitive proper names—but the biggest barrier that readers will face is the lack of relatable stakes. An intricately detailed but emotionally flat novel set in early medieval Ireland.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9780692043868
Page Count: 421
Publisher: Careswell Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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