Readers who traveled the continent with Lewis and Clark in Brian Hall’s masterly I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company...
A daft Vermonter and his loyal nephew precede Lewis and Clark—in an erudite and absorbing tweak of the Great Exploration.
Skirting the dangerous whirlpools of whimsy and preciousness, novelist (The Fall of the Year, 1999) and memoirist (North Country, 1997) Mosher, himself a Vermonter, spins a light-as-air western concoction. Narrator Ticonderoga (Ti) Kinneson, only son of a small-town newspaper editor, has grown up under the tutelage of his father’s energetically eccentric brother Private True Teague Kinneson. Uncle True—whose claim to have accompanied Ethan Allen at his victory would have made him a soldier at age seven—drives his younger brother to distraction, but he is his nephew’s hero and friend. True blames his dottiness on a fall taken at the celebration of the Vermont victory at Ticonderoga, a whack to the skull requiring the constant protection of a copper basin, itself protected by a knit, belled cap. Oh, and he wears a codpiece. It would be a lazy student, then, who did not catch the references to Cervantes as Uncle True escapes New England to compete in a race to the Pacific against President Jefferson’s official party, references to whom Mosher makes happily and unpretentiously (L. Frank Baum pops up too). The utterly loyal Ti, mounted on a fine stallion, a gift, like True’s white mule, from President Jefferson, dutifully follows the possibly mad man to Monticello and the world beyond, a world that includes Daniel Boone’s nymphomaniacal daughter, an endless succession of interesting Indian tribes, big skies, and near-daily encounters with death and disaster, with escapes almost always due to True’s boundless ingenuity, which was unaffected by the disastrous blow to the head all those years ago. In the midst of the madness and maelstroms, Ti learns to paint well enough to invent a genre that incorporates Indian artistic conventions. The Kinnesons are in constant contact with but always ahead of Lewis and Clark, and they do, indeed, make it to the Pacific.
Readers who traveled the continent with Lewis and Clark in Brian Hall’s masterly I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company will see the same landmarks and run into the same people, but they’ll have a much, much easier trip—and more fun.Pub Date: June 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-19721-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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