An involving, richly atmospheric historical novel about the clash of cultures in frontier America.
The lives of two strangers converge in a 19th-century Native American encampment in this historical novel from Williams (Walls for the Wind, 2015, etc.).
This story is based in part on the experiences of David Thompson, a real-life 19th-century Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader who left behind an account of his adventures. Williams has absorbed that story, mixed it with several other histories of Hudson’s Bay Company’s interactions with Native American peoples in the Rocky Mountains, and produced a richly detailed novel that displays a consistent but low-key authority. The stand-in for Thompson here is 17-year-old Donal Thomas, an indentured servant of the company who’s sent to live with the Pikani (also known as the Naapiikoan) for the course of a brutal winter in order to learn their ways and lay the groundwork for trading relations. He’s surprised to find in their encampment a young woman who’s not Pikani—a healer who’s been living among the tribe for years. She’s Isobel Ochoa y Ramirez, the daughter of Mexican hacienda-owner Don Armando Ochoa, and when she was a small child, Apache warriors captured her and her father; they killed him, enslaved her, and taught her the rudiments of medicine. These were brutal, lonely years in which “she believed in nothing, and loved no one,” and they ended only when Utes tribesmen kidnapped her and eventually traded her to the Pikani. Williams tastefully mines the dramatic potential of his characters’ outsider statuses, and his portrayals of Donal’s and Isobel’s perspectives are pointedly well-done. However, the novel’s greatest strength lies in its evocation of the cultures and political tensions among the Native American peoples it chronicles, from the Apache to the Ute to the Pikani to the Peeagan to the Blackfoot. The personalities and dialogue in these sections bring the old cultures to life—a literary territory that’s been well-marked-out in books by W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear. The book fritters away its building tension in the closing act, but in general, Williams has crafted an absorbing reading experience.
An involving, richly atmospheric historical novel about the clash of cultures in frontier America.Pub Date: May 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5327-1056-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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