Despite such digressive longueurs as Miriam’s extended stay with the Essenes, and spotty character development—Miriam’s...
Mary speaks out, dispelling rumors that she’s a wimp, in Halter’s latest Bible-based historical novel (Lilah, 2006, etc.).
Young Miriam of Nazareth is thrust into activism when she hides Barabbas, leader of the resistance against tyrannical madman King Herod, in her carpenter father Joachim’s house. Later, Joachim is captured and sentenced to be crucified outside Herod’s stronghold at Tarichea. Mary enlists the help of Barabbas and his gang of street urchins from Israel’s despised underclass, the am-ha-aretz. One of these, Obadiah, becomes her platonic soul mate after he climbs up to free Joachim from the cross during a daring rescue mission. When an all-male parley, including Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus the Pharisee and Barabbas, can’t agree on what to do about Herod and his Roman backers, Mary defies convention and injects her opinion. Sent to study with Rachel, founder of a feminist enclave in Magdala, Mary learns Latin and Greek and grows even more adept at bucking male authority. She befriends Rachel’s daughter Mariamne (the future Mary Magdalene). When Barabbas and a gravely wounded Obadiah appear on Rachel’s doorstep, Miriam insists they consult Joseph of Arimathea, a famous healer. But Obadiah dies en route to the Essene community where Joseph lives. Miriam confounds this ascetic order of celibate men by staying outside the compound walls night after night, mourning Obadiah at his pauper’s grave. When her mother, Hannah, is murdered by Herod’s mercenaries, Miriam returns to Joachim, who has taken refuge with his apprentice Yossef (Joseph). After rebuffing a marriage proposal from Barabbas, Miriam announces that she is pregnant, but her avowals of virginity incite mostly shock and skepticism. Yossef sticks by her and it’s off to Bethlehem for a certain census. A faux—but convincingly worded—“Gospel of Mary” explains certain mysteries, including the Resurrection, but not the virgin birth.
Despite such digressive longueurs as Miriam’s extended stay with the Essenes, and spotty character development—Miriam’s hysteria occasionally undermines her modernity—a lively re-imagining of the New Testament.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39483-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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