An engaging, mildly disturbing account of how this country came to be.
Miller’s historical fiction debut tackles America’s growth during the 18th and 19th centuries as told by Native Americans, the settlers who laid claim to the land and those caught in between.
History is a funny thing. As the saying goes, it’s often written by the winners, with little discussion of the peoples and customs crushed in the name of “progress.” Most accounts of the United States’ expansion prove no exception, focusing on the birth of a nation rather than the costs to its native population. In his novel, Miller attempts to present a more balanced view, giving both “red” and “white” characters the chance to speak their piece. Caught in the middle is Stephen Ruddell—a child of the frontier and decidedly pro-American, until he’s kidnapped by the Shawnee at the age of 12. Befriended by his captor, the historically famous warrior Tecumseh, and adopted by the tribe’s chief, Stephen (renamed Sinnatha) soon embraces his new life. He spends more than 15 years with his adopted family, battling encroaching white settlers in order to preserve native lands. But the white men keep coming and spilling blood. To stem the violence, Sinnatha and Tecumseh’s leader, along with many others, sign the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. As part of the agreement, all white “captives” are returned to their families. Sinnatha once again becomes Stephen; stuck between two worlds, he’s fully embraced by neither. Miller jumps back and forth between the past and present-day 1845, using Stephen—now a grizzled old man telling his tale to a historian—to effectively detail Native American life and the ways it was destroyed. He also underscores how differently the warring factions viewed and treated one another. Wishing only to maintain their traditional ways, the Native Americans rarely underestimated their enemies and usually treated their prisoners as equals. The same cannot be said of the population that took the land by force. As Tecumseh says, “Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth?”
An engaging, mildly disturbing account of how this country came to be.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480280816
Page Count: 324
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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