Secret Chord (Brooks) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
A page turner.... Brooks is a master at bringing the past alive...in [her]skillful hands the issues of the past echo our own deepest concerns:  love and loss, drama and tragedy, chaos and brutality.
Alice Hoffman - Washington Post


There’s something bordering on the supernatural about Geraldine Brooks. She seems able to transport herself back to earlier time periods, to time travel. Sometimes, reading her work, she draws you so thoroughly into another era that you swear she’s actually lived in it. With sensory acuity and a deep and complex understanding of emotional states, she conjures up the way we lived then.... .Brooks has humanized the king and cleverly added a modern perspective to our understanding of him.... [Her] vision of the biblical world is enrapturing.
Boston Globe


Deeply sympathetic.... Brooks offers new perspectives on a character whose story has captured the Western imagination for millennia.... [S]he breaks from the biblical version by giving voice to the voiceless women in David’s life: wives and lovers, a daughter, a mother—the beloved and the scorned.
Chicago Tribune


The David that bursts off the page in this chronicle is a larger-than-life commixture of virtues and flaws.... I may be late to the party on the amazing Ms. Brooks, but The Secret Chord won me over. Its storytelling magic is as timeless as the tale it tells.
San Francisco Chronicle
                                                                  

Rich and imaginative.... Thanks to Brooks, David is as compelling as he is contradictory, with the writing in The Secret Chord as lyrical as the lyre that David plays.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


[A] deeply imaginative exploration of this once powerful but deeply flawed ruler.... Brooks is a gifted, engrossing storyteller. Like March and People of the Book, The Secret Chord is studded with action, interesting characters, sweeping timelines and moving scenes filled with drama and conflict.... [A] timely and universal exploration of the limits of loyalty, the seductive and corrupting influence of power, and the intersections between sin and faith, punishment and redemption.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


A compelling read, contemporary in its relevance.... The Secret Chord is powerful storytelling, its landscape and time evoked in lyrical prose.
Guardian (UK)

 
The best historical fiction.... Brooks gives the whole king his due.... It’s a tall order to breathe life into such a human being, and she manages it admirably.
NPR


Brooks’s interest in religious commitment accrues rich rewards in this ambitious and psychologically astute novel about the harp-playing, psalm-singing King David of the bible.... [E]vents provide plenty of melodrama and considerable suspense.... [Told with] the verve of an adroit storyteller.
Publishers Weekly


Brooks has given us a portrait of a monarch who is despicable, heartless, and cruel and yet can inspire and reciprocate passionate love and fierce loyalty. The author's use of archaic language, including the Hebrew spelling of names...slows down the narrative, but her writing is insightful and impeccably researched. —Susan Santa, Syosset P.L., NY
Library Journal


[G]orgeously written....The language, clear and precise throughout, turns soaringly poetic when describing music or the glory of David’s city.... [T]aken as a whole, the novel feels simultaneously ancient, accessible, and timeless.
Booklist


"He was big enough, but no giant." With that gently dismissive allowance, spoken by the biblical King David, Brooks continues to explore the meaning of faith and religion in ordinary life.... A skillful reimagining of stories already well-known to any well-versed reader of the Bible gracefully and intelligently told.
Kirkus Reviews