A fact-filled but somewhat dry look at farm life in 19th-century America.
In a bid to avoid military conscription, a farming family leaves its Prussian home in the 1880s to seek a new future in the United States in this debut historical novel.
August Mallast fought in three wars as a young man. Now, as a father of seven, he fears his eldest sons may soon be forced into military service. With trouble brewing for the German empire on multiple fronts, August and his wife, Rosina, make plans to immigrate to the U.S. The two oldest Mallast boys—Rudolph and Adolph—are the first to make the journey, crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard the SS Oder. August, Rosina, and the rest of the children follow later on the SS Wieland. And after a brief reunion in New York, the family sets off together for the Midwest. Its destination? Michigan, a state that the clan is told has “lots of land and opportunities to pursue farming without high taxes or the need to support centuries-old hierarchies.” Shortly after their arrival, the Mallasts secure a lease on a farm near Lake St. Clair, five miles east of Mount Clemens. In subsequent years, the family logs long hours tending crops and livestock in hopes of putting down permanent roots with the purchase of their own farmland. The author hews closely to the facts when reconstructing this immigrant tale. The main characters, August and Rosina, are based on Prevost’s great-grandparents, and insider details about farmhouse dinners and favorite pastimes add to the tale’s authenticity. Readers should also delight in the historic family photos included in the book. But the author’s reluctance to stray from documented facts leaves the novel feeling unfinished. The story is driven by the records available rather than the characters. Prevost includes blow-by-blow accounts of several family land deals. But scant attention is paid to the emotional highs and lows experienced by the Mallasts as they make their way in a new land.
A fact-filled but somewhat dry look at farm life in 19th-century America.Pub Date: June 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9846369-0-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: RLP Industries
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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