Book Blurb:
This is the story of Herod the Great’s mother and how she brought the Arabic world of Nabataea and the Latin world of Rome to the Land of Israel.
The Middle East, 76 BCE. Internal power struggles consume Jerusalem’s attention while surrounding nations manipulate events for their own purposes. Two young women from opposite worlds—Pninah, a poor Jewish girl subject to seizures, and Cypros, a Nabataean princess—are thrust by violent events into a collision course with each other and history.
Bitter for Sweet carries on the tradition of intense, lyrical, and deeply moving historical fiction started in the award‑winning Keziah’s Song and Blind Man’s Labyrinth. By capturing the era and its people with his characteristic raw intimacy and plainsong prose style, Daryl Potter brings this story of these women—and a fateful Roman invitation—vividly to life.
This is a tale about hope and consequences that you will remember for the rest of your life.
Book Buy Link: https://mybook.to/bitterforsweet
Editorial Review:
With both 'Keziah's Song' and, more recently, 'Blind Man's Labyrinth', Daryl Potter takes the reader to the intensely troubled world of Israel in the period prior to its subjugation by Imperial Rome. Once more Potter weaves a poetic and beautifully embroidered evocation of the time and the place in 'Bitter for Sweet' and this is a proud and remarkable addition to his distinctive and lyrical work. As with his previous books, this is not a book to periodically dip into or attempt to 'skim'. A great deal is required of the reader, not least a commitment and a level of concentration, lest a point, a particular phrase, or a piece of historical information be missed! It would also serve the reader well to be pre-armed with a certain back knowledge of major historical events. This will stand readers in good stead and the writer has thoughtfully placed a highly useful map of the region at the beginning of the book. A list of the principal characters would have been useful.
The issue of 'mugging up' on the period aside, the reader will swiftly succumb to the graceful style of the writing and to the significance of the occasionally laconic sounding pronouncements of the characters. A word of warning here. Virtually no 'conversation' is ever idle. These exchanges are mostly bristling with significance for the future. This is a book to be truly savoured. The readers find themselves suddenly immersed in the violent and deeply divided political cockpit of Eretz-Israel in the first century BCE in the Levant; a geographical area often [and lazily] referred to as 'The Holy Land''. It is a place bubbling and seething with bitter hatreds and divisions and beset by covetous neighbours. At the heart of this lies the truly profound divide between the groups known as 'the Pharisees' and the 'The Sadducees'. A prudent and judicious referral to a search engine before starting will reveal just how bitter and important to this fine example of Historical Fiction this religious and social split is!
Riding out of the lands of Nabataea, and to add to this explosive mix, comes the Arab child bride Cypros; a young girl already touched by tragedy and with a knife in her hair. She is the political bride of the son of the Governor of Idumea; a man whose people have only recently converted to Judaism. This young girl, the future mother of Herod, will change the future, and the fate, of Eretz-Israel forever!
Nabataea, it is important to state, is far from being some savage place in the middle of nowhere: ''The Nabataeans maintained their secret routes through the Great Desert. These routes supplied spice and other trade goods from mysterious places in the east to the Greeks and the Romans and Egyptians in the west. Besides Caravans, the Nabataeans now held cities like other people of the world. Damascus in the north was now Nabotaeaon. Raqmu [Petra] as well.' And this thirteen-year-old is no mere child bride either. She is of high status and she has killed one of the group that murdered her family and led the other murderers to their deaths in the trackless desert. Throughout that dreadful journey alone she was sustained by a single thought; her devotion to her God: ''We are the people of al-Qaum. And al-Quam guides us........I have always loved al-Qaum above all.'' As she sits in the group discussing the forthcoming wedding, she appraises her future father-in-law: She has a similar lack of respect for the God of the Jews:
''Through your son and your Queen, I will change you. I serve al-Qaum. Your Yahweh is no match for al-Qaum.''
Cypros is settled within the Palace of the Governor of Idumea on the coast at Ashkelon. Soon her young husband inherits the title and now she is the wife of the Governor. As time passes, she bears children and loses others in childbirth. All the children are boys, save for one daughter - Salome. They are raised as Jews and in the Jewish faith and she remains largely a powerless witness to the tumultuous events in Jerusalem when the old Queen Salome dies and the inevitable power struggle between her two sons, the Pharisee Hyrcanos and his more energetic and ambitious younger brother Aristobulos, who is very much of the Hellenic influenced and more internationally minded Sadducee faction. Cypros is frustrated and restless. She is a Nabataean set amongst Jews. As a non-Jew, she knows she is despised. One evening she looks down upon her sons as they sleep:
''You and your brothers will be my knives..'' she muses. ''she looked down again at Joseph and saw someone powerful. She saw the changing of an oak tree- one that walked. She saw all three boys, walking together, as fearsome men......Go ahead. Hide me away in despised Idumea. Accept me as good only for breeding. Among the ghosts of eighty witches I will give birth to terriers who will rule you all.''
This is a promise she intends to fulfil. The two sons of Queen Salome she holds in contempt and Antipater, her husband, she views as a political infant. She yearns to return to her ancestral desert lands of Nabutaea and to teach her children, raised as Jews, the virtues and the strengths of her homeland:
''In the desert the environment had been her tool. Everything had been hers in the desert. No one had corrected her, hemmed her in, or chained her down. Raqmu's refreshments had likewise provided joy and strength. By contrast, Ashkelon and Jerusalem were shackles......''
While Cypros plots and broods in her Palace in Ashkelon, in her airy Palace by the sea, and in Jerusalem; whilst she sets her very young sons character building life lessons in the desert around Raqmu, the reader is aware of another significant and very different character as she bobs and weaves constantly through the narrative. This is Pninah, and her childhood guide and protector, Gavriel. Two young children, [they are both ten when first we meet them] and we have periodically observed them growing up and living a precarious hand-to-mouth existence and of petty crime in the dangerous and mean streets of faction-ridden Jerusalem. Gavriel, with his speed and sharp wit, and his expert knowledge of the labyrinth of the streets of Jerusalem, proves to be of great service to Aristobulos, one of the two warring sons of Queen Salome. Pninah, a girl subject to fits at inconvenient moments, that she describes as her 'demon', is very much the junior partner. They grow up, living on their wits, as Cypros herself grows in wisdom and maturity. Pninah is no stranger to violence, as she warns a potential molester:
''The last man to cause me trouble was twice your size....I put the point of this blade through the side of his head. Right behind the eyes, where the skin is soft....A man doesn't die right away. A demon comes first and carries that man all over the ground, into fire, off a ravine's edge.....Once it is done, it's done. Even if it takes a long time, the end comes eventually.''
Clearly, Pninah is not a person to be trifled with and the reader is left wondering as the pages turn in this brilliant and absorbing novel if or at what point the lives of these two very different women might possibly coincide; and what such a meeting might result in.
By the time the narrative has reached a certain point; the point, say, where Pninah has fled Jerusalem in disgust at her life there and at Gavriel's uncaring behaviour and has found temporary security and a peace of sorts with an elderly sheep herder, a point where Cypros has finally set off in the wake of a large Nabatean army to restore the permanently drunk former King of Jerusalem to his throne in return for far greater power and the opportunity for the sons of Antipater and Cypros to be the real power behind the throne, Potter has achieved a very important aim. With admirable skill and sensitivity, he has instilled in the reader a sense of investment, of caring about these two orphans of murdered parents: of Pninah in search of peace and a sense of serenity and fulfillment, and of Cypros in search of her own manifest destiny, for both her and for her sons. Both women, their lives, motives, and ambitions, are movingly and sympathetically portrayed. Potter achieves this with ease and with the skill of a master. The narrative has arrived at a point where both Pninah, with her debilitating and unpredictable epileptic fits, and highborn Cypros, the Nabataean; she of the icy resolve and the towering ambition, come together on a lonely sheep farm in the hills above the plain of Jericho. For the first time, Pninah is content:
''She wondered if she might be a shepherdess forever. If she might get her own sheep one day or hire herself out to tend those of others. She liked it better than anything she had ever done in the city.''
For Cypros, there has been a sequence of setbacks and failures, serving only to fire her determination. Faced once more with a failure to achieve their objectives, she viewed her husband attempting to come to terms with his latest setback, strengthening her resolve:
''Cypros thought of the knife in her hair. She felt acid in her throat, but allowed her instinct to respond. Tonight, her husband's failure was official. Tonight he could have his darkness. Tomorrow, she would explain the sunrise to him.''
The two women form a bond while they await in vain for affairs in Jerusalem to resolve themselves. This develops into a very deep and permanent friendship, bordering on love: ''Holding Pninah, [during one of her fits] Cypros wondered if certain friends always shared a tender intimacy like this or if sisters would. She tried to remember her sisters, slain on the desert road, but she could not. These shepherd girls had replaced those faded memories....''When Pninah recovers from her fit she asks how long Cypros has been there. She replies: ''Long enough to love you, and to think about others I love, though poorly.'' and later: ''Friends is good. We are strange friends, though: A Nabotaean Governor's wife and a shepherdess from Jericho.''
Cypros must witness her plans come to nothing, witness failure and the deaths of thousands of her people in pursuit of those plans, and witness the arrival of the might of Rome to interfere in and affect the destiny of Eretz-Israel and the surrounding region forever. Pninah, for her part, has a further burden of fear and suffering to bear, being forced to flee her temporary refuge with her young friend Salema in search of security on a long journey through the horrors of the desert and in the caves of the rocky heights whilst affairs between the two troublesome sons of the dead Queen Salome - the two brothers whose quarrels brought so much misery to the land - move backwards and forwards. Cypros continues to rage and to plot at each reversal. At one point she rages against her husband on one occasion in Jerusalem:
''You and Hrycanus don't belong here. This is my city. This is al-Qaum's city. You and Hrycanus and your God had a year of merry making at Jerusalem with nothing to show for it but the murder of an innocent Holy man and a Passover fraud. Then the both of you exited the city like schoolboys scolded by their tutor.....Your cowardice and inability to see ahead cost your brother his life.''
It is not the purpose of this review to dwell on any further description of events in this book. The conclusion is a fitting triumph! In his trilogy on the subject of the Israel of this period, Potter has presented the reader with a trio of dazzling gifts. ''Bitter for Sweet'' is a fine example of the storyteller's art and is a superb evocation of the period and all its political, social, and especially religious issues. Underlying this is a constant awareness of historical facts. Potter has brought to life for the reader very real people and very real lives and the difficulties they must attempt to overcome. ''Bitter for Sweet'' is another great work by the author. This is at times a challenging book, not one simply to be consumed. It is a book requiring attentiveness. The reader will be enriched by this investment. The reviewer wishes ''Bitter for Sweet'' the success it so richly deserves.
*****
“Bitter for Sweet” by Daryl Potter receives five stars from The Historical Fiction Company and the “Highly Recommended” award of excellence.
Award:
Author Bio:
Daryl Potter has been a cornet player, carpenter, nurse, emergency room assistant, chicken catcher, medical genetics lab technician, IT manager, and banking product manager. He has explored Egypt's pyramids, Israel's deserts, and Turkey's archaeology. In addition to studying Alexandrian Greek and ancient Hebrew poetry, he has been bitten by a wolf in northern British Columbia and attacked by a western diamondback rattlesnake in California. He and his wife share their home outside Toronto, Ontario, with their two teenage children.
His first novel, Keziah's Song, explores the tumultuous 135-101 BCE period, focused on the Seleucid Empire and Israel. Further books in the series will explore the period 135 BCE to 135 CE with a reach that expands to include Egypt, Rome, Nabataea, and the Parthian Empire. This is a period of history full of little-known stories that are as dramatic as anything found in most popular fantasy novels and whose effects continue to shape Western Civilization and three of the world's major religions.
For more information and Daryl's blog, please visit www.darylpotter.com
*****
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