Action-adventure, set against the life of Yeshua, the prophet who dared speak against “the way of the world, protected by...
Dekker (Outlaw, 2013, etc.) makes the spiritual real through the fictional Maviah, daughter of Rami bin Malik, Bedu sheikh.
It’s A.D. 30. Maviah has returned from Egypt into her father’s reluctant care. She was born illegitimate, her father’s daughter by a woman from an outcast Bedu tribe; thus, her exile. Now she’s been returned from Egypt because she’s given birth to a baby son “without a suitable husband.” Her father is the Banu Kalb’s great sheikh, but contrary to nomadic traditions, he settled at Dumah in the Northern Arabian desert, allying with his wife’s uncle, Nabataean King Aretas. Now Nashquya, Malik’s wife, dies, her death robbing Maviah of protection and jeopardizing Malik’s power. Aretas gives his support to the Thamud, an aggressive Kalb enemy. Worse, Malik is betrayed by Maliku, his son. As Malik’s overthrown, he dispatches Maviah to Palestine. She’s to convince King Herod to persuade Rome to support the Kalb. Dekker plunges headfirst into this complex scene-setting, thereafter ramping up drama with Maviah’s perilous trek across the desolate Nafud desert. Dekker’s descriptions of the Nafud’s dangers—think Lawrence of Arabia—are powerfully done, as are his portrayals of the perils posed by the clashing customs of Arabs, Jews and Romans in an era when women were property. Dekker’s secondary characters sparkle as well, including the Bedu Judah, a convert to Judaism who’s entranced with Yeshua of Nazareth. A nicely scripted romance develops between Judah and Maviah—“Judah was like water to my heart”—but as Maviah seeks Herod at Sepphoris, she worries she’s “too common to win the favor of a king.” Then she meets Yeshua—“I could not doubt I was looking at more than a mere man.” What follows are machinations at Herod’s court and then pain, imprisonment and swordplay at Aretas’ Petra court, before Dekker offers an ending supporting his announced sequel.
Action-adventure, set against the life of Yeshua, the prophet who dared speak against “the way of the world, protected by position and sword and gold and knowledge.”Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59995-418-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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