Hats off to this compelling historical mystery.
In this Michigan-based mystery set in the 1930s, there are hints that a farmer’s much-younger wife had something to do with his deadly accident.
The newspaper report that 41-year-old Samuel R. Forrest died “in an unfortunate farm accident” omitted the gory details. The gate to the pen holding Black Devil, the farm’s bull, had been left open. The beast got out, apparently became enraged, and tore apart Sam’s body, ripping away his face. The paper also didn’t say that Sam’s wife, Polly Wolcott Forrest, “as pretty as any screen star,” is a mere 20 years old. Polly’s sister, Sarah Wolcott Johnson, older by 11 years, lives on the farm next door with her husband, the Rev. Wesley Johnson, and their three children. Wesley remembers how Polly once flirted with him, and his “unhealthy desire for Polly had kept growing.” Townspeople notice the fashionably dressed, blue-eyed blond does not look or play the part of a grieving widow. Polly stops attending church and starts cruising the town with former neighbor Jacob Frond in his Model A. Because of reports that the Forrests had an unhappy marriage—“everyone in the congregation had seen Polly’s bruises,” and there were rumors that Sam’s weight loss was due to poisoning by his wife—the local sheriff conducts multiple interviews with Polly and the Johnsons. The lawman wants to determine who left the gate open to Black Devil’s pen. Sarah, Wesley, and Polly take turns narrating different chapters of Whitney’s book. Polly’s portion, primarily epistolary, has her writing to her Connecticut-based mother, encouraging her to visit and relaying her dreams of becoming a milliner (she labels veils “the fashion statement of the moment”). The different points of view and the clues to Sam’s personality and death are quite engaging. The pacing moves the story along briskly, and historical references enrich the novel. Setting the Depression-era tone are conversations about massive job losses and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s agricultural programs, plus vivid descriptions of patched hand-me-downs and “long, hungry, gaunt faces.” Yet a hopeful tone prevails, and images of Michigan meadows, apple picking, and sunshine layered through puffy clouds are skillfully laced in the engrossing tale.
Hats off to this compelling historical mystery.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9851601-0-9
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Lake William Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.
Family bonds are twisted and broken in Jordan’s meditation on the fallen South.
Debut novelist Jordan won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for this disquieting reflection on rural America, told from multiple perspectives. After steadfastly guarding her virginity for three decades, cosmopolitan Memphis schoolmarm Laura Chappell agrees to marry a rigid suitor named Henry McAllan, and in 1940 they have their first child. At the end of World War II, Henry drags his bride, their now expanded brood and his sadistic Pappy off to a vile, primitive farm in the backwaters of Mississippi that she names “Mudbound.” Promised an antebellum plantation, Laura finds that Henry has been fleeced and her family is soon living in a bleak, weather-beaten farmhouse lacking running water and electricity. Resigned to an uncomfortable truce, the McAllans stubbornly and meagerly carve out a living on the unforgiving Delta. Their unsteady marriage becomes more complicated with the arrival of Henry’s enigmatic brother Jamie, plagued by his father’s wrath, a drinking problem and the guilt of razing Europe as a bomber pilot. Adding his voice to the narrative is Ronsel Jackson, the son of one of the farm’s tenants, whose heroism as a tank soldier stands for naught against the racism of the hard-drinking, deeply bigoted community. Punctuated by an illicit affair, a gruesome hate crime and finally a quiet, just murder in the night, the book imparts misery upon the wicked—but the innocent suffer as well. “Sometimes it’s necessary to do wrong,” claims Jamie McAllan in the book’s equivocal dénouement. “Sometimes it’s the only way to make things right.”
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-569-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as “a high-grade bitch” but...
A full-throttle dive into the psyche and romantic attachments of Beryl Markham—whose 1936 solo flight across the Atlantic in a two-seater prop plane (carrying emergency fuel in the extra seat) transfixed the world.
As conceived in this second historical by novelist McLain (The Paris Wife, 2011, etc.), Markham—nee Beryl Clutterbuck—is the neglected daughter of an impecunious racehorse trainer who fails to make a go at farming in British East Africa and a feckless, squeamish mother who bolts back to England with their older son. Set on her own two feet early, she is barely schooled but precociously brave and wired for physical challenges—a trait honed by her childhood companion Kibii (a lifelong friend and son of a local chief). In the Mau forest—“before Kenya was Kenya”—she finds a “heaven fitted exactly to me.” Keeping poised around large mammals (a leopard and a lion also figure significantly) is in her blood and later gains her credibility at the racecourse in Nairobi, where she becomes the youngest trainer ever licensed. Statuesque, blonde, and carrying an air of self-sufficiency—she marries, disastrously, at 16 but is granted a separation to train Lord Delamere’s bloodstock—Beryl turns heads among the cheerfully doped and dissolute Muthaiga Club set (“I don’t know what it is about Africa, but champagne is absolutely compulsory here”), charms not one but two heirs to the British crown at Baroness Karen Blixen’s soiree, and sets her cap on Blixen’s lover, Denys Fitch Hatton. She’ll have him, too, and much enjoyment derives from guessing how that script, and other intrigues, will play out in McLain’s retelling. Fittingly, McLain has Markham tell her story from an altitude of 1,800 feet: “I’m meant to do this,” she begins, “stitch my name on the sky.” Popularly regarded as “a kind of Circe” (to quote Isak Dinesen biographer Judith Thurman), the young woman McLain explores owns her mistakes (at least privately) and is more boxed in by class, gender assumptions, and self-doubt than her reputation as aviatrix, big game hunter, and femme fatale suggests.
Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as “a high-grade bitch” but proclaimed her 1942 memoir West with the Night “bloody wonderful.” Readers might even say the same of McLain’s sparkling prose and sympathetic reimagining.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53418-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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