An intriguing historical novel that effectively sketches out elements of Ponca traditions.
Salvatore offers an illustrated, series-starting novel about the origin of a gifted 19th-century Indigenous Ponca healer.
In this book’s foreword, poet Clifford Taylor notes that the author had a dream of two women, one Native American and one White, who inspired the characters in this series. In this first book, Salvatore tells the story of Big Horse Woman’s early life, set against the backdrop of real-life Ponca history. Born in 1833, the protagonist is first known as Water Willow. By age 4, she begins to have premonitions of danger that those around her heed. She learns to hunt, sew, cook, find uses for plants, ride horses, and tell her people’s stories. Her idyllic childhood at Planting Creek, west of the Missouri River, is cut short by a smallpox epidemic, which sickens her in 1843. Her grandmother nurses her back to health, but the rest of her family dies. Her village moves to a new location, and she gains a loyal dog companion named Ears Up. Soon, her people start interacting with White settlers, but she avoids them. When she starts menstruating in 1847, she begins hearing the voice of her guiding spirit, which leads her to save a colt from drowning; the animal comes to be called Big Horse, and she becomes known as Big Horse Woman. Her childhood friend unadvisedly steals horses from the Crow people to impress her, which leads to tragedy. Overall, this is an enjoyable story with appealing elements of magical realism. This novel’s plot is a complex one, but there’s much more to this publication, as Salvatore illustrates it with her own original artwork, as well as real-life public-domain images; she also includes Ponca language pronunciation guides. The informative text features ethnographic information and an extensive annotated bibliography of sources about Ponca history during the 1800s, showing the author’s extensive research. Salvatore isn’t Ponca herself, but she includes supporting testimonials from nearly a dozen members of the Ponca nation who vouch for the accuracy of the details of this fictional story.
An intriguing historical novel that effectively sketches out elements of Ponca traditions.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2022
ISBN: 9781957861050
Page Count: 381
Publisher: Big Horse Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2022
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 tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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