An often absorbing story and an impressive work of scholarship.
A historical novel based on Christopher Columbus’ travels in the Caribbean.
Rowen’s work mainly toggles between the Spanish Court and La Isla Española (aka Hispaniola, shared now by Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Although the author takes certain liberties with historical fact, Caonabó is a real-life figure, as is his wife, Anacaona, who’s still revered in Haitian folklore. Caonabó is a formidable enemy to European invaders, led by Columbus (“The Admiral”); of all the Indigenous caciques (chiefs), he’s the most determined to kick the “pale men” off the island once and for all, while other caciques try to accommodate them to varying degrees. Most simply cannot fathom the Spaniards’ fierce relentlessness and arrogance, and guile is shown to trump innocence throughout this account. A particularly poignant figure is young Bakako, whom Columbus captured and forced to be his interpreter and, in effect, his spy; the islander is shown to be torn between two worlds, but he finally chooses to be “Diego Colón,” Columbus’ adopted son, and take his chances with his captor’s people. Rowen’s book is a formidable work of research, with a wealth of backmatter including a glossary and a list of historical sources. However, the prose can be puzzling at times, with strange verb choices (“Cristóbal writhed that it was evidence of disaster”; “Onaney excused uneasily”). There are also some wonderful passages, although the scenes of battle, plague, and starvation can be hard to get through; readers may also find it difficult to reflect on how an obsessive search for gold can turn a person toward evil. Indeed, to read this book is to be forced to confront the very worst of arrogant, hubristic conquest—and the sobering fact that the conquerors achieved their grim goals.
An often absorbing story and an impressive work of scholarship.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9991961-3-7
Page Count: 504
Publisher: All Persons Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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