Still, Shrake moves the plot along with zest. His portrait of a tiny nation, born in struggle, fighting to survive and to...
A vigorous portrait of the fledgling Texas republic, set in 1839 and involving a large cast of gaudy, outsize characters.
Journalist and screenwriter/novelist Shrake (Blessed McGill, 1967; coauthor, with Harvey Penick, And If You Play Golf, You're My Friend, 1993) has done his research well. Like Larry McMurtry, he has employed astonishing details about the period, and his backdrops—of Comanche and Cherokee villages, and small, embattled Texas towns—are convincing, as are the motivations of his characters, many based on actual figures. Their actions, however, can sometimes approach melodrama. Sister and brother Cullasaja amd Romulus Swift, the offspring of a Cherokee woman and an Irish-American sea captain and merchant, head west because beautiful, determined Cullajasa wants to find an Indian utopia rumored to be in Texas, a village built by her mother's people. The handsome, accomplished Romulus, a physician, accompanies her. They quickly fall afoul of the sexual psychopath Henry Longfellow, a Texas politician who, when his rape of Cullasaja is frustrated, plans revenge. All three become entangled with Matthew Caldwell, a bright, lethal frontiersman who is a captain in the newly formed Texas Rangers, trying to preserve Texas from another Mexican invasion and the plots of a variety of shabby politicians attempting to loot or exploit the new nation. Looming in the background are the Comanches, who claim much of Texas as their hunting ground and view the white settlers with bafflement and disdain. Before the narrative is over, the village Cullajasa has been seeking is destroyed, a disastrous war with the Comanches is instigated, and Longfellow exacts his vengeance. Shrake's battle scenes have a gory reality, and his depiction of life on the frontier is vivid and compelling. But the novel is slowed somewhat by characters who can seem one-dimensional. And a subtext regarding a mystical quest is both jarring and cryptic.
Still, Shrake moves the plot along with zest. His portrait of a tiny nation, born in struggle, fighting to survive and to invent an identity, is often gripping. An unusual, ambitious work of historical fiction.Pub Date: April 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6579-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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