An immersive dive into an underrepresented moment in American history.
A freed slave fights to get her family admitted into the Cherokee Nation in Walker’s debut historical novel.
In 1886 in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), Sput Louie McClendon and her husband, Benjamin, are former slaves attempting to scratch out a living on the unforgiving prairie of Feather Falls Township. Benjamin is part Cherokee, and Sput hopes that this will lead to them receiving Cherokee membership and a land allotment. That dream is shattered when they instead receive an unexpected visit from Goliah T. Lynch, also known as “Old Crow,” the half-white, half-Cherokee local landowner whose possessions, prior to Emancipation, included Sput and her husband. Goliah aims to evict the McClendons from the land, a task in which he takes personal pleasure, despite the fact that Benjamin is his biological son. That evening, Benjamin goes out to confront Goliah and doesn’t return. Fearing that Goliah has killed him, Sput seeks help from her enemy’s rival, the Cherokee clan elder Two Bird. Now the head of the household, Sput must find a way to get herself enrolled as a Cherokee or condemn her family to poverty—and perhaps death. Walker’s grit-inflected prose perfectly captures the hardscrabble environment of Sput and her neighbors: “Goliah chuffed, as his eyes swept across not only their slapdash shack of a home that leaned to one side but all of their various sheds and shanties surrounding it that had been built with every throwaway piece of mismatched, misshapen lumber and boards they could gather.” The characters, all of whom have complex relationships to Cherokee identity, are well drawn and uniformly engaging; the concept of belonging is also a recurring theme. The pacing drags, at times, but the author still manages to turn Sput’s story into a stirring saga with a genuinely affecting conclusion. Readers with a keen interest in American history will particularly enjoy this tale set in an relatively obscure corner of the country’s past—one that complicates American perceptions of race while exploring universal notions of family and hardship.
An immersive dive into an underrepresented moment in American history.Pub Date: June 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-49283-4
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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