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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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