Part One. Summer 70 C. The Assassin's Daughter. We came like doves across the desert. In a time when there was nothing but death, we were grateful for anything, and most grateful of all when we awoke to another day. Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers shows us a world where doves, in addition to serving day-to-day purposes, represent so much more. Along with their close cousin, the pigeon, doves make up the bird family Columbidae.
It is written in the first person. Published in October 4th the book become immediate popular and critical acclaim in historical, historical fiction books.
The main characters of The Dovekeepers novel are Aziza, Yael. The book has been awarded with Booker Prize, Edgar Awards and many others. One of the Best Works of Alice Hoffman. Please note that the characters, names or techniques listed in The Dovekeepers is a work of fiction and is meant for entertainment purposes only, except for biography and other cases. DMCA and Copyright : Dear all, most of the website is community built, users are uploading hundred of books everyday, which makes really hard for us to identify copyrighted material, please contact us if you want any material removed.
Because of them I continued, but God must have known it had crossed my mind to stay behind. I wanted to lie down beside the rocks and dream of the Baker, to call for him to come back to me, even if it meant giving up with world. Perhaps that was the sin I committed.
I forgot that even the worst of lives is a treasure. There they both come to work in the dovecote, collecting eggs and distributing the compost they gather. Among those in Masada are Shirah and her daughters, one of which is named Aziza, the other Nahara. Aziza was a daughter cherished by her mother, and loved by a father figure that taught her how to protect herself, to be capable of fighting to defend herself, her sister and mother. A woman taught everything by her mother about this world, everything necessary to carrying into the World-to-Come.
It was a recipe book for the human heart, for our people believe that all we know and all we have experience is contained there. If you want a reason, take this: We yearned for our portion of the sky. View all 42 comments. Jan 02, Sean Barrs rated it did not like it Shelves: historical , love-and-romance , 1-star-reads , ancient-rome.
This was massively underwhelming. The plot was terrible; it had no real development or drive. In reality, it barely existed at all. The story just followed the lives of some rather mundane characters. There was little to keep me reading. The historical detail was minimal, and the random magic elements that were worked in the plot were just so This was massively underwhelming. The historical detail was minimal, and the random magic elements that were worked in the plot were just so pointless that they might as well have been taken out.
I was rather annoyed. Well, at least not in the traditional sense. The author has evoked the era well in terms of the social aspects she portrayed. They are quick to supress and control.
But, in terms of the huge political events, the ones that change governments and shape nations, this was hugely underdeveloped. So, it remained forever in the background. This was more a chronicling of their lives rather than a portrayal of real historical detail.
As a huge fan of historical fiction, I was incomparably disappointed because there was so little history involved. The cover was very missleading. The prose was heavily descriptive. It was massively convoluted in this. The desert scenes were painstakingly arduous in their perpetuity. Then, at one point, she gives a ridiculously long section over to describing the wind. I mean the…wind. This needed some elements of subtlety in the writing, and a stripping back of its overworked imagery.
Then there are the characters themselves. I hated them. I hated them all, every last one of them. Well, except for the goat in the first part. I quite liked the goat. That says it all. When the goat is your favourite character in the novel, then you know that you hate it. Well, that kind of happened when I read this excruciating novel, but not in the literal sense. Pity that goat my friends, pity her. View all 9 comments.
Jan 08, Gary rated it it was amazing. Masada was a historic Jewish fortress that stood on huge rock in Judea now southern Israel In 73 CE Jewish patriots killed themselves as Masada rather then surrender to Roman forces.
For many Israelis their devotion to liberty is a national symbol called the spirit of Masada. This is a fictional story of four women who may have lived there. I was thoroughly entranced by this tour de force-a definite masterpiece of 21st century literature. This brilliant novel takes us back to Ancient Israel Masada was a historic Jewish fortress that stood on huge rock in Judea now southern Israel In 73 CE Jewish patriots killed themselves as Masada rather then surrender to Roman forces.
This brilliant novel takes us back to Ancient Israel in the first century CE and the lives of four beautiful, sensual, strong and valiant women. Each of whose story interwines with that of the other, and how they came to the fortress of Masada in Israel, commanded by the courageous warrior and remarkable leader of men, Yair Ben Eliezer.
I fell in love with all the four women featured in the novel. The strength, courage and wisdom of these women was brilliant and inspirational. A historic novel, a novel of magic, mystery and the spiritual, and sensually written piece of literature about women and exploring the time in history from the viewpoint of women but never a Novel only for women. Yael the daughter of an assassin who'se father treats her with unforgivable cruelty and whose passions and great capacity for love stay with us Revka who survives the horrific rape and murder of her daughter at the hands of Roman soldiers and lives to refind meaning in her life Aziza the girl warrior, brought up as a son, lithe , athletic and beautiful, her fate is to fall in love with a fellow warrior and Shirah, the enchanting , beautiful sorceress, cast out because of bigotry and religious dogma, her fate is to be the great love of the commander of Masada, the great Yair Ben eliezer and who does all she can to save her doomed children.
A book of great emotion and haunting as it is exquisitely erotic and evocative of the Land and people of Israel. It teaches something of the time and the place but never lingers on the teaching. Whatever genre you enjoy if good writing and an unforgettable spellbinding narrative is what you are looking for, this book is a must read.
I finished it in three days. View all 3 comments. With only a couple of exceptions, every GR friend who read it rated it very highly.
Writers Toni Morrison and Wally Lamb praised it as well. I offer up my thoughts for those very few of you who also struggled. I ended up feeling like many of the Jews wandering in the desert for forty years, except for me it was forty years of five hundred pages. Initially, the chosen people were hap 2. Initially, the chosen people were happy to be free of the yokes of slavery and have enough nutritious manna to eat.
Then the years did not fly by and the grumbling started in—Are we there yet? Is there anything else to eat besides this white stuff? We want meat! I was definitely feeling very ungrateful and unappreciative by the halfway mark. I think it got it its own way. Weaving a tale around the personal stories of four women and how they came to be at Masada was promising fiction. However they all spoke with the same esoterically flowered speech to the point of reading exhaustion.
Since the ending of this historical event was known and would be no surprise reveal, it was all about the journey getting there. It became necessary for me to break and read other books in order to finish.
A just okay read for me but it finished well and I am compelled out of loyalty to bump it up to three stars. View all 17 comments. Jan 09, Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing Shelves: netgalley. Judea AD Women Dovekeeper's: collecting birds eggs, gathering droppings to ferlise the fortress's orchard's. These women tending to the Masada's dovecotes, formed a small community within a larger one.
They each bring their conflicts with them. They live with guilt, grief, loss, fami Judea AD They live with guilt, grief, loss, family conflicts, difficult births, jealous conflicts, and secrets. These women express sexual freedom - care about gender equality, and emancipation.
Some of these women- take lovers, have babies, steal babies, cast spells. Sibling issues. Friendship issues Jewish struggles Revka watched her daughter be raped and murdered by a Roman soldier. Her husband was also murdered. She has two grandsons --whom are her life. Yael's mother died during childbirth. Her father, a political assassin , treated her awful --as if she were to blame.
She was close to her brother Amram Yet Amram followed his father's footsteps --became a powerful assassin, himself as a young man. Yael's closest friend is her brother, Amram! The Assassin, Simon, -- who trains Amram to be an assassin later becomes Yael's lover but so much more --I can't give all the details away Shirah is considered the medicine woman --yet is also accused of witchcraft.
She's a feminist heroine in many ways -- using her power to help other women who are in need. Aziza was raised as a boy and as a warrior -- 'until' the age of 16 --when she rebels. She meets Amram She and Amram fall in love. Channa is the barren wife of a character based on the real-life leader of Jewish rebels. Here are a couple lines to ponder I asked for nothing, and that was exactly what I received.
If I was clever, I tried not to show it. If I was injured, I kept my wounds to myself. I turned away whenever I saw other girls with their fathers, for mine did not wish to be seen with me.
There was a great seer who advised that, should a man hold a witch in the air, he could then cut off her powers, thereby making her helpless.
But such an attempt would have no effect on me. My strength came from water, my talents buoyed by the river. On the day I swam in the Nile and saw my fate in the ink blue depths, my mother told me that I would have powers of my own, as she did. But there was a warning she gave me as well: If I were ever to journey too far from the water, I would lose my power and my life. I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what is what causes women to drown.
Characters are well developed Story is easy to follow Reading is fast I fully enjoyed this book I don't care what the negative-people say Jul 18, Carole rated it liked it Shelves: books-read-in This is a work of historical fiction.
The story is based on the Roman attack on the fortress at Masada in 73 A. Since I have visited this site in present-day Israel, I was interested in reading a novel based on this event.
In terms of the history, Hoffman has done an admirable job of researching and narrating the events at Masada. She describes the time, place and culture of the ancient Hebrews with great detail. However, in terms of the fictional part of the nove This is a work of historical fiction. However, in terms of the fictional part of the novel, she does not do such an admirable job.
The plot is pure suds: dysfunctional families, infidelity, far-fetched coincidence, secret love affairs and emotional conflict galore. The book is far too long pages and seemed even longer due to the tedious writing style. The story is told from the point of view of four different characters.
I was having a hard time keeping them straight until I realized that the reason was that they all had the same voice. What this book needed was a good editor who is not intimidated by Hoffman's status as a best-selling author.
Preferably an editor with a big pair of scissors who would cut out at least pages. And maybe an editor who would have the courage to point out that a story cannot be told in the first person by a dead character. So, mostly two stars but I gave it three because of the history. View all 11 comments. Sep 09, Jason Golomb rated it really liked it Shelves: fiction , historical-fiction , ancient-rome , roman-empire , literature.
In fact, one evening my wife looked at the book while I was reading in bed and said: "You're reading Alice Hoffman? I've read Alice Hoffman. But you don't read Alice Hoffman!
This is a very good book. It's real deep and very weighty. Rome was large and in charge and in the midst of shatter "Dovekeepers" is the first book I've read of Alice Hoffmans'. Rome was large and in charge and in the midst of shattering a Judean rebellion seen commemorated in the famous Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum only a few hundred yards from the Colosseum in Italy.
Several hundred Jews fled Jerusalem to the desert near the Dead Sea and moved into the former mountain fortress of King Herod at Masada. While the proud Jewish rebels held off a Roman legion for several years, Rome ultimately prevailed and all but two women and five children killed themselves rather than allow themselves to be overrun.
Hoffman's novel follows the lives of four women who all find themselves on Masada. The stories connect the women together in ways that are obvious and follow the primary arc of the novel, but also in ways that are surprising and poignantly fulfilling. The connections build and develop on many levels: physically, emotionally, and symbolically.
The book is full of characters who are broken and hurt; affected by some deep trauma catalyzed by the Roman attacks on Jerusalem; driving each, by their own will or otherwise, to the fortress in the desert. There are few happy endings. Hoffman's themes cover the gamut from fate and destiny, to religion and love, and the depths of devotion. Faith is a thread that runs throughout Hoffman's carefully woven tapestry.
It's not just a religious entity, but something that binds individuals, family units, as well as the entire rebel community. In Revka, Hoffman ponders the rebel Jews: "If we lost our faith, we would become like the clouds that swell across the western sky when the wind pushes them into the desert promising rain but empty inside.
Hoffman's Judean world is one of religion and tradition, of myth and magic: a world where everything in it has significance Some vignettes read almost as something out of a fantasy novel, but there's no melodrama to their weight. In looking for a good way to summarize the books' tone, I found a couple of strong quotes.
But would you ask to be anything else? In this misogynistic society, few men come across in a truly positive light. Though Hoffman writes very sparingly, in her few words, she's able to expresses a multiplicity of ideas and thoughts. Characters are never solely what they seem to be and there is very little that is purely black or white.
This book is going to resonate strongly for a lot of readers. It may be a bit polarizing because of its very serious nature. But as a first time reader of Hoffman, and a male, I feel fuller for having read this novel. I highly recommend it. May 29, Susan rated it did not like it Recommends it for: anyone who has a table with one leg an inch too short. I wore garments of green, white, and blue as I traversed the distance from my chamber to the chamber of Lynda, who lives in a county where rivers run not to the great inland sea where I can watch the sun rise every morning, but to the river that once formed the boundary between our land and lands of the Spanish Empire before an audacious Corsican who tried to conquer all of Europe agreed to sell them to the United States under President Thomas Jefferson.
Moving toward the setting of the sun, whi I wore garments of green, white, and blue as I traversed the distance from my chamber to the chamber of Lynda, who lives in a county where rivers run not to the great inland sea where I can watch the sun rise every morning, but to the river that once formed the boundary between our land and lands of the Spanish Empire before an audacious Corsican who tried to conquer all of Europe agreed to sell them to the United States under President Thomas Jefferson.
My grievances were myriad. I am astonished that the writer does not appear to possess the knowledge of how to Show Not Tell. Even more agonizing is the use of multiple first person narrators who all speak in the same voice, especially when they all affect a pompous, grandiloquent voice as if to remind the reader that the writer has set the story in The Holy Land during Biblical times. One might marvel at her ability to sustain such a style for hundreds and hundreds of pages.
Yet I wearied of it, and as I was to learn, so did Lynda and the rest of my sister book-lovers. Only a lively, fascinating plot about believable, likeable people, or nonfiction accounts of important events, can keep me engaged in spite of a pedantic writing style.
A tedious, obviously fantastical story, especially one that speculates about real historical figures or attributes anachronistic values to major players, cannot overcome the weaknesses of a book seemingly written not to edify or entertain but to make the author look clever. View all 13 comments. Apr 02, Tania rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorite-books , historical-fiction , best.
The desire for Jerusalem was a fire that could not be quenched. There was a spark inside that holiest of holy places that made people want to possess it, and what men yearn for they often destroy.
I've realized that when I rate a book on GR, four stars mean that it's a really good book and that I would highly recommend it to most people, but when I rate a book five stars it mostly means that there was a personal connection with the book. This was definitely the case with The Dovekeepers, although The desire for Jerusalem was a fire that could not be quenched.
This was definitely the case with The Dovekeepers, although it touched me deeply, I can't explain exactly why and I'm not sure who I would recommend it to. There's many reasons why I should not have loved this book as I did. Although the writing is exquisitely beautiful, it is not an easy-read. The story is told using a first-person point of view, so it focuses more on observation than on action. It's more about the character's thoughts than anything else.
The characters are complex, and with the exception of Revka, they are not always easy to like. The author mixes religion with sorcery, which is also not everyone's cup of tea. But despite, or maybe because of all of the above reasons I fell in love this book. I am so glad I got to know these four characters and this bit of history. It will stay with me for a long time, and joins my other top reads which includes The Poisonwood Bible and The Sandcastle Girls. The Story: A tale inspired by the tragic first-century massacre of hundreds of Jewish people on the Masada mountain presents the stories of a hated daughter, a baker's wife, a girl disguised as a warrior and a medicine woman who keep doves and secrets while Roman soldiers draw near.
View all 6 comments. Mar 07, Camie rated it it was amazing. This book has been called Alice Hoffman's masterpiece, her most ambitious and mesmerizing writing, and I surely agree. This is the richly told story of four strong and mysterious women from diverse paths who find themselves drawn together as sacred dovekeepers for the Jews who held off the fierce Roman army for months in the Judean desert at the mountain fortress Masada.
No doubt you know something about the famous siege, and this great fictional yet fact related tale has all of the ancien This book has been called Alice Hoffman's masterpiece, her most ambitious and mesmerizing writing, and I surely agree. No doubt you know something about the famous siege, and this great fictional yet fact related tale has all of the ancient mysticism, magic, and passion that make up a spellbinding read.
View all 14 comments. Apr 20, Mandy rated it it was amazing. Once again a book I picked up because of book club.
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