Disarmingly powerful—a nuanced story of female resilience that reaches across the ages.
A mysterious orphan becomes a saintly figure after discovering she has a miraculous gift in Payne’s medieval thriller debut.
The novel opens in Konya, Turkey in 1270, where Rumi, the poet and Sufi mystic, is approaching the end of his life. He has been called on to perform the funeral of a girl whose charred body has arrived in the possession of a partially tongueless monk. On attending to her, the poet is overcome by the scent of roses and discovers the girl to still be alive. The narrative then skips back to 1256 to describe the birth of Damascena in a Bulgarian monastery. The friar who assists in her delivery, Ivan Balev, is alarmed by the smell of roses that surrounds the child and by the arrival of a stork that seems to watch over her. After her mother’s disappearance, Damascena is left to be raised by the increasingly malevolent Ivan; as a young woman, she escapes the monastery. She discovers that she has the gift of turning roses into rose oil and is recognized as a saint. However, she again falls into the clutches of Ivan, who devises ways of exploiting her gift. The true meaning of her existence becomes clear only when she escapes to Turkey and encounters Rumi. Payne has crafted an absorbing page-turner whose plot unfolds at a satisfyingly unhurried pace. The author takes time to embellish the story with carefully crafted descriptions: “her long, dark hair—as shiny as a raven’s wing in the mid-day light.” The prose is beautifully uplifting, particularly when communicating the spiritual change Damascena’s gift brings to the monastery: “Young and old spoke of seeing God between the trees, within the trees, in the clouds and in the face of the sun.” There are rare occasions when the author’s descriptive approach is too heavy-handed; however, this detracts little from a thought-provoking story that, in many ways, echoes the tenor of Rumi’s work in its desire to understand the human condition and seek courage in vulnerability.
Disarmingly powerful—a nuanced story of female resilience that reaches across the ages.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780982279762
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Skywriter Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
Sweet, sharp, and satisfying.
Their daughter’s wedding stirs up uncomfortable memories for a divorced couple.
The day before the ceremony, the bride’s mother, Gail Baines, second in command at the Ashton School in Baltimore, learns that not only has she been passed over to replace the retiring headmistress, but the new recruit is bringing her deputy with her. The lack of people skills that have cost Gail this promotion are evident even in that initial scene; she’s a classic cranky Tyler protagonist, given to blurting out her opinions with little consideration for others’ feelings. Her first-person narration also reveals her to be touchingly vulnerable, convinced that daughter Debbie, prettier and more polished than she, will inevitably prefer husband-to-be Kenneth’s overbearing, better-off parents. Although her divorce from Max was amicable, Gail considers him a bit of a slacker, and isn’t best pleased when he turns up with a rescue cat in tow and says he has to stay with her because Kenneth is horribly allergic. A startling revelation from Debbie, fresh from her pre-wedding “Day of Beauty,” immediately divides the exes, who have very different opinions about how their daughter should handle this crisis. It also leads to Gail’s revelation of the infidelity that led to their divorce, though not in the way readers might imagine. Laid-back Max is the only fully fleshed character here other than Gail, and the novel is very short, but Tyler’s touch is as delicate, her empathy for human beings and all their quirks as evident in her 25th work of fiction as it was in her first, published an astonishing 60 years ago. Gail’s acerbic observations about the wedding and all its participants, her wistful memories of her odd-couple romance with Max, and her account of their enforced intimacy over the three days surrounding the wedding alternate to poignant effect. The closing pages offer a happy ending that feels true to the characters and utterly deserved.
Sweet, sharp, and satisfying.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803486
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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