HelloKatieO’s #CBR4 Review #36: The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman

I’ve been tabling this review because I truly loved this book, and I’m not sure how to review it in a way that does it justice.  The Dovekeepers is a work of historical fiction that tells the tale of the Jewish resistance during the Roman’s siege of Masada in the first century.  900 Jewish men and women held out against the Romans for months, and ultimately, 2 women and 5 children survived.  Hoffman used meticulous research to weave a mystical tale of desire, family and friendship that gives a voice to the women who participated in the siege.

The book is told in four pieces.  Yael is the lion, a young girl who’s mother died in child birth who flees her home city with her assassin father and her brother’s best friend. Her illicit romance, her betrayal of her confidant, and her seeemingly magical ability to attract both humans and animals with her silence is oddly compelling.  Revka, the baker’s wife, serves partially to set up the romance of the book but also as proof of a mother’s capacity for vengeance.  Aziza is a warrior, disguising herself as a boy to defend her people and falling in love with a man everyone else thought was broken. Shirah is a “witch” of sorts, who uses her powers for good – like aiding women giving birth to illegitimate children – and her own ends – like protecting her children or ruining her lover’s wive’s life.

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Valyruh’s #CBR4 Review #12: The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman

Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers is an ambitious attempt to re-tell the story of the last stand at Masada of hundreds of Jewish rebels and their families under Roman siege during the first century. Beginning with the story of one woman fleeing through the desert, to the ultimate mass suicide of nearly 1,000 Jews, Hoffman’s story–told from the vantage point of a group of women living within the Masada redoubt–is filled with violence, adultery, seduction, and mysticism, and as such undoubtedly holds great appeal to those readers looking for such things. What I can’t figure out is why so many really fine contemporary authors are singing the praises of this book whose prose I too often found overblown rather than poetic, and whose supposed dedication to elucidating the role of women in ancient Jewish history was tainted by her more overriding interest in making the New York Times best seller list.

Her story swirls around the mysterious tatooed Shirah, known as the Witch of Moab, her two daughters Aziza and Nahara, the baker’s widow Revka, and Yael, the red-headed daughter of a renowned Sicarii assassin. Shirah is carrying on a secret affair with the married leader of the Masada rebels. Aziza is a warrior in female garb who yearns to reveal her true self. Nahara abandons her mother and sister out of a combination of jealousy over her mother’s maternal relationship with Yael and love for a boy from the Essene cult. Revka raises her mute grandsons while nursing a guilty secret. And “flame-haired” Yael (how many times do we have to hear that description), who communes with animals, ends the book as enigmatically as she begins it.

Admittedly, Hoffman knows her craft and succeeded in keeping my interest alive throughout most of the book. She effectively conveys the raw and lethal beauty of the desert, the smells and sounds of the dovecote, the slow starvation of people trapped in a crumbling fortress and their ultimate and bloody self-sacrifice.  But when it came to human relations, which is what Hoffman’s story focuses on, I felt cheated. There is so much melodrama that I was choking with it, and so much mysticism that I felt at times like I was wading through a Kabbalistic work.  When I finally finished the book, it was like coming up for air. In some books, this could be good. With The Dovekeepers, it was just a relief.