Twisting, turning, and stumbling toward wisdom.
A coming-of-age novel set within the historical context of the late-19th-century rush to build a transcontinental railroad across the southern U.S. to San Diego.
Brendan and Gertrude Gould, children of Harold, wealthy financier in Akron, Ohio, are emotionally and financially beholden to their father. Brendan, who at four was sent away from home to live with an aunt after the sudden death of his mother, still seeks his father's love and approval; Gertrude, who has modeled herself after her father, thrives on the power afforded her by his wealth and position. Close to Brendan's heart is a plan to start an employee-controlled company in Akron to raise the standard of living. Disapproving of this venture, Harold orders him to travel to San Diego to gather information on the plausibility of a Texas and Pacific Railroad. Gertrude is in cahoots with her father until up-and-coming artist Luke Field, watching her study one of his paintings at a local gallery, notices another side to her. Sadly, Harold thwarts their love affair when he threatens to disinherit Gertrude if she marries an "artisan." Despairing over what he perceives as Gertrude's ambivalence, Luke heads out West to illustrate an article for Harper's. After quickly recognizing her mistake, Gertrude defies her father and sets out to find her love. For brother and sister, their journeys are personal awakenings, as they venture into the Wild West from their privileged positions in stodgy Akron. Despite occasionally clunky writing and a few overly complex subplots, Blake handles the various narrative turns with confidence: a Mexican rebellion driven by Harold's plan to annex Baja California; Brendan's visions of his mother in a sweat lodge built by a clairvoyant Indian; and Luke's partnership with a Chinese miner with lightning reflexes in a gold mine he's inherited from a recently deceased teacher. Much of the novel has to do with what is inherited and what is chosen, posing challenging questions for these young people at the close of the 1900s.
Twisting, turning, and stumbling toward wisdom.Pub Date: June 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-4134-3849-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
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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