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YOU CAN'T PUSH A ROPE

Name: YOU CAN'T PUSH A ROPE
Author: Clint Trafton
ISBN: 978-1552123386

by Clint Trafton ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 6, 2006

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A historical novel in the vein of John Steinbeck about a long disputed New Mexican territory and the Hispanic and White families that call it home.

This is an admirably ambitious book, with much to say about race, colonialism, civil rights and man’s relation to the earth. The novel focuses, promisingly, on the uneasy relationship between its two strongest characters: Joaquin Peralta, a fiery leader of a community group devoted to winning back the title to land they believe was stolen by gringos from their Mexican and Spanish-settler ancestors; and Joaquin’s stepson Chava Traxler, a half-white, half-Hispanic teenager who comes to question the group’s increasingly militant tactics. However, that story is diluted by the novel’s overly large reach. The characters are too often used as vehicles for exposition and info-dumping, with long speeches about the technical details of the land dispute stemming the flow of the narrative. The point-of-view shifts too often to incidental characters whose lives and thoughts are not fleshed out fully enough to coalesce into true, necessary plotlines. Action is well written, and between all the guns, shooting and storming of properties, there’s lots of it. At times, however, the book reads like a newspaper article dutifully reporting all the facts, rather than inevitabilities that should spin out from the motivations and psyches of the characters. The biggest missed opportunity of the book is Joaquin; despite opening with his point of view, Trafton confusingly moves away from him in the second chapter and never fully returns. Enough groundwork is laid out to suggest an intriguing, charismatic personality on the level of Malcolm X, but readers are deprived of access to Joaquin’s interior thoughts and feelings; the result is an angry, one-note cutout. Chava exhibits greater self-reflection and character development, but in the end he, too, is unable to break free from the novel’s dogged, didactic devotion to its larger sociopolitical themes. Vivid and well-mapped-out, but ultimately closer to history lesson than novel.

Pub Date: July 6, 2006

ISBN: 978-1552123386

Page Count: 316

Publisher: Trafford

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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.