For wonderful period details, a tender love story, and frontier humor, this continuing saga is highly recommended.
In this second volume of her Irish Blessings series, novelist Williams (Walls for the Wind, 2016, etc.) focuses on Irish immigrant Devin Cavanaugh and biracial saloonkeeper Dulcinetta Jackson as they make lives for themselves in the Wyoming Territory.
Construction on the Union Pacific has moved on. In fact, the golden spike has finally been hammered in. Devin, raised an orphan and street urchin in New York City, has thus lost his railroad job and now works for a freight outfit out of Bryan City. One of the regular delivery routes for him and mule skinner Caleb Wilson is to South Pass City in gold mining country. One soggy morning, they are forced to take Luther Brandingham III, a young passenger who, they will find out, is Dulcinetta Jackson’s son. Devin is smitten the moment he sets eyes on the comely Dulcie. She owns the freighting business and learned canny business skills from her aunt and mentor, Lou Schering. Seeing Caleb as the grifter and drunkard that he is, she makes Devin the boss, Caleb the underling. A very sore loser, Caleb enlists some Sioux to ambush the next freight run. Almost everything is lost, and Devin barely survives. But Caleb isn’t done. He confronts Dulcie at gunpoint. What happens then shows a Dulcie who is almost preternaturally calm and crafty. Anyway, times are changing, and Devin and Dulcie move to Bryan City to begin a new chapter in their lives. Other characters needing mention are Xiang Ju, Dulcie’s stiff-necked servant, and Ailis Tierney, Devin’s friend from the orphan days, and perhaps we haven’t seen the last of them. Williams writes quite well and is very good at detailing that time and place and making us root for Devin and Dulcinetta. Dulcinetta especially is a marvelous creation, and her confrontation with that fool Caleb is alone worth the price of admission. And the way Luther takes to Devin and vice versa is heartwarming.
For wonderful period details, a tender love story, and frontier humor, this continuing saga is highly recommended.Pub Date: May 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-987767-26-1
Page Count: 178
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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