A vividly rendered story of survival in the Arizona Territory, hampered by a tendency to ramble.
A single mother of four in the Arizona Territory strives for independence in Sweeney’s Western.
It’s 1899, and it’s no secret that Ruby Fortune shot her husband. After enduring his abuse for years, the “Girl Wonder” sharpshooter of the Wild West circus circuit struck back. In this novel by Sweeney, the author of Answer Creek (2020), freshly widowed Ruby wastes no time in ensuring that she’s provided for in the wake of her husband’s death, securing an inheritance by questionable means. With the help of friends in high and low places, she becomes the proprietor, cook, maid, and manager of the brand-new Jericho Inn, and begins a new life. Although her day-to-day life is quickly consumed by her new responsibilities, unsavory characters from Jericho and beyond darken Ruby’s doorstep, bringing with them the lawlessness, roguery, and tension readers expect from a Western. Ruby has little patience for the wheedling threats of locals who’ve had it in for her ever since she shot her spouse, and much less for those outside the community who pose dangers to herself and her family. She deals with each situation as it comes and does her best to mask the emotional toll it takes on her. Bursts of sudden, graphic violence, including in-depth descriptions of rape and domestic violence, seem to have few repercussions on the overall plot, which moves sluggishly through the Arizona heat. Still, despite the rough environment and frequent dangers, this novel is best understood as a slice-of-life story—a long, hard look at the experience of a woman making it on her own at a particular moment and place in time in American history. Fans of historical fiction and those with an interest in details of life in the Western territories will find it particularly engaging. Still, Sweeney spends so much time building atmosphere that she doesn’t give adequate attention to each theme, character, and subplot she introduces.
A vividly rendered story of survival in the Arizona Territory, hampered by a tendency to ramble.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-233-2
Page Count: 376
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2022
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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