Book Review #43 - The Dovekeepers

This is my first Alice Hoffman book.  Truthfully, I'd never heard of the author Alice Hoffman until I read a few reviews comparing The Dovekeepers to her many, many other works.  I'm not exaggerating when I write many twice.  She's written nearly fifty books.  I should have heard of her.

Some of her other titles ring a bell but they aren't the kinds of stories I'm drawn to.  I'm not sure what made me select and stick with The Dovekeepers either, as it isn't even the kind of story I usually go for.  Four women living in 70 CE (which is the secular dating system meaning Common Era vs. the more familiar Christian friendly AD nomenclenture), share their backstories and journeys to their arrival and stay at the famed Masada, a massive rock fortress built by King Herod near Jerusalem, and their work in the community dovecote when the Roman armies fell upon them and close to one-thousand Jews committed mass suicide.

It's an odd book.  Maybe it's Hoffman's style but the narration is unusually distant.  It reads as if ghosts are retelling their doomed story but that's not wholly accurate.  There is a methodical, almost hypnotizing rhythm to it.  It's filled with foreshadowing as whichever of the four narrators clearly already knows both the outcome and the reason for sharing any particular detail, and that sense of foreboding kind of feels ghoulish.  But, not scary.  It's not even that suspenseful as the outcome is pretty obvious if you know the history at all, which was first recorded by Josephus who claims that only two women and five children survived.  Hoffman sticks with that accounting but obviously fictionalizes the details.

Apart from being a story about Masada, it is also a story about ancient feminism.  I don't know how true this is.  History has been mostly written and kept by men so the motivations, fears and desires of women can only be applied from general truths.  They must have loved.  They must have felt passion.  They must have shown great courage and strength and protection for those they nurtured when necessary.  As a woman, I know these traits could not have come only from more recent freedoms.   Freedom helps but it is who we are.

The narrations start to weave and intersect more and more towards the end of the book until the four women's stories become one heroic and tragic end.