A vividly imagined historical drama of racial tension on America’s last frontier.
Spanning the turbulent years between 1855 and 1867, Bell’s debut novel follows the trials and tribulations of young newlywed and soon-to-be mother Mellie Pickett after she leaves the metropolis of San Francisco for the wilderness of Northern California with her husband, Law—“a man who could hardly read, a man who said ‘the-ay-ter’ and had never been inside one.” While the debate about slavery intensifies elsewhere in the country, Mellie and Law encounter a different conflict in their new home, which lies between the indigenous people native to the land and the white settlers arriving in search of unblemished country. Law is distrustful of—but not hateful toward—their neighbors, while Mellie, inspired by the example of her progressive father, makes an effort to better understand their customs and way of life. In the process, she develops a friendship with a healer woman she calls Bahé—whose skepticism about Mellie’s naïvely good intentions (“Got to be grown and still didn’t know how the earth gives and takes”) makes her easily the most likable character. Bell’s richly textured, well-researched narrative, which alternates between first-person chapters narrated by Mellie and third-person chapters following Law, Bahé and the rest of the valley’s ever growing population, captures the settlers’ varied attitudes toward Native Americans, as well as the uncertainty and indiscriminate tragedy of frontier life. While Bell’s prose occasionally errs toward the overwrought (“[a] heartless moon burned over the corral,” “blood over his shoulders like a cloak,” etc.) and includes a few too many tired devices such as letters and dreams, she writes with a natural ease and authority. From its first line—“It was a beautiful country, though I hated and feared it”—Bell’s is a nuanced, intelligently crafted debut.
This complex, confident novel introduces a promising new voice in historical fiction.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1941551028
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Washington Writers' Publishing House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An emotionally wrenching story with a dramatic happily-ever-after.
A young woman with secrets finds home, community and a potential new love in a small North Carolina beach town; now if she can only rid herself of a past that haunts her, she may just have the life she’s always longed for.
No one in Southport, N.C., seems too concerned with the fact that Katie wants to keep to herself, even if it is a small town, and she’s a mysterious, pretty woman. But since there’s only one attractive, eligible man in the whole town—Alex, the widowed owner of the town’s general store—then it only makes sense that the two would notice each other. Throw in a couple of events that allow Katie to show herself as a woman of character (despite her secretive ways) and Alex to represent a perfect man, and of course, the two of them will wind up on the path to true love. Especially since she’s great with kids, and he just happens to have two of them, to whom he is a gentle, wonderful father with the patience of a saint. But, alas, Katie is a woman with secrets, and that generally means that there is someone out there looking for her. Since Katie lives in a tiny, isolated shack in the middle of nowhere, it’s a good thing she likes her quirky new neighbor, Jo. Jo encourages her to become more invested in Alex, who, everyone knows, is a good man. Romance progresses. A haunting past life catches up with Katie with frightening consequences. Love prevails.
An emotionally wrenching story with a dramatic happily-ever-after.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-455-52354-2
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2013
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
