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
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
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