Cornwell’s no-fail mix of historic tidbits and good-humored action makes the usually gloomy ninth century sound like a hell...
A dispossessed Northumbrian gets a military education from the Danes before reluctantly signing on to serve the humorless Wessexian king, he who will eventually become Alfred the Great (849–99).
Opening yet another series, Cornwell, who turns out about two high-quality historicals a year (Sharpe’s Escape, 2004, etc.) without breaking a sweat, examines, through the eyes of a reluctant vassal, the career of the only English king to rate a Great. Born Osbert, younger son of Uhtred, ealdorman of Bebbanburg, on the coast of Northumbria, robust, war-loving Uhtred got renamed on the death of his older brother, killed by the Danes who, on a later raid, seized the lad and, admiring his spunk, kept him as a sort of pet. And Uhtred loves the Danish life. Back in Bebbanburg, his father and grumpy stepmother had been trying to have him educated by Beocca, a too-serious, too-Christian monk, but Uhtred wasn’t interested. (And Uhtred’s greedy uncle wanted him dead.) Ragnar, the warrior Dane who spared Uhtred’s life, seeing real soldier potential in the boy, taught him the fine points of disemboweling, decapitating, etc., in a blissfully wild childhood on the land the invaders had seized from the very disorganized English. Besides loving the warrior life, Uhtred finds rowdy fatalistic paganism infinitely more sensible and appealing than the morose and, well, wimpy Christianity his countrymen cling to. The one glitch in his new life is the lifelong enemy he makes when he interrupts the prepubescent sexual assault on Ragnar’s daughter by Sven, son of Kjartan, one of Ragnar’s lieutenants. Sven and Kjartan will eventually be the death of Ragnar, forcing Uhtred and his wild English girlfriend, Brida, to move south, reluctantly resuming their British identities and drifting into the camp of Alfred, the only king on the island who hasn’t capitulated to the invaders.
Cornwell’s no-fail mix of historic tidbits and good-humored action makes the usually gloomy ninth century sound like a hell of a lot of fun.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-053051-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
Veteran historical novelist Gear (Sand in the Wind, 1993, etc.) again uses an accurate rendering of the North American past as a backdrop for some vigorous fictional heroics, this time involving a beautiful Confederate spy of skill and courageous cool. As the story opens in May 1864, half-Cherokee Robin Walkingstick Heatherton, disguised as a black boy, observes the horror of the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia. Returning to Richmond, hoping to spend Christmas with her five-year-old son, Jeremy, Robin reports to President Jefferson Davis that she has retrieved secret letters from England, taken from the body of another female Confederate spy who drowned in her eagerness to reach land from a stormy sea. Davis warns her of a deranged Yankee officer, Thomas Corley, who blames Robin for the death of his brother and swears he will hunt her down. The Confederate president sends Robin to Tennessee to join her husband, cavalry officer Charles, but the two have only one night together before he is shot by a Northern firing squad. Robin escapes and returns to Richmond for Jeremy. On to March 1865: Aboard a river boat, Robin, using one of her many aliases, wins a claim to a gold mine in Colorado while playing poker. But tough loner Garrison Parker has put in his claim for the same mine, and before black and white hats have it out in the town of Central City, Colorado, Robin will suffer a broken rib, team up with a good woman to care for Jeremy, and discover unexpected love and kindness. All ends with her last-minute escapejust when she's within an ace of cashing in her Wonder Woman chips. A heroine's tale with wide, breathless fictional strides. (This first in a projected ``Women's West'' series may appeal to YA as much as adult readers.)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85701-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
Though he navigates erratically within it, Machart has created a dense, vibrant world, achievement enough for his debut.
A wager destroys a farm family in this risk-taking first novel about Czech immigrant landowners in early 20th-century South Texas.
Hard men are grabbing land any way they can. Vaclav Skala has been softened by a loving wife, who has borne him three sons, but when she dies giving birth to a fourth (Karel), he reverts to his old self, the hardest of taskmasters. He has his boys, not horses, plow the fields; they will be marked for life by misshapen necks. In 1910, their lives are upended by the arrival of Villaseñor, a hugely rich Mexican looking for land and husbands for his three comely daughters. He proposes a horserace to Vaclav; if he wins, he’ll marry off his girls. Vaclav, confident in his racehorse and Karel’s riding skills, agrees. The race is a fine set piece. Villaseñor, the superior strategist, has already won over the older boys, who will ignore some dirty tricks. Karel loses to Graciela, the Mexican’s youngest. There are recriminations. After a vicious fight, Vaclav banishes his three oldest, who marry the next day. What next? A violent blood feud? Not at all. Machart is after more than stirring melodrama. The cadences of his formal prose, punctuated occasionally by earthy dialogue, tell you that, just as his shuttling between 1910 and 1924 minimizes suspense. He is making a resonant statement about the deformities of a world in which men make the rules, and mothers are dead or powerless. This involves the introduction, in 1924, of benighted twins, teenage brothers, firebugs who have avenged their dead mother by burning to death the father who brutalized her. There is much more, including bootlegging rivalries and a second deadly fire, but the trouble is, Machart fails to integrate plot and theme, and the novel splinters into a variety of episodes, all of them rendered with flair.
Though he navigates erratically within it, Machart has created a dense, vibrant world, achievement enough for his debut.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-15-101443-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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