An engrossing and well-written tale of the Old West.
A resolute woman teams up with a retired soldier in this Western set in post–Civil War Texas.
In this first volume of a historical fiction trilogy, Conhaim tells the stories of Laura Little, a White woman determined to return to the Comanche family she lived with for years, and Scott Renald, the retired soldier intent on bringing her back to her White relatives. In the book’s opening pages, Laura escapes from the mental institution where her prominent White family confined her after bringing her back to Fort Worth. Scott, in the course of pursuing the survivors of a stagecoach attack, meets Laura while she is being held by the Tonkawa. Although she is not the captive he was commissioned to find, Laura decides he is her best chance for returning to her own tribe and joins him. They make their way through the Texas desert, and when Scott learns that Laura has ties to the wife and sister he lost many years earlier, he agrees to return to the Comanche settlement with her to pursue his own goals. Factions of soldiers, Comanche, Tonkawa, and White civilians deal with one another as players in the United States’ efforts to establish its control over the West. The author is a cinematic writer, and his descriptions of shootouts (Laura “inched the rifle barrel into daylight, a movement detectable to anybody on the lookout”) and settings (“Peering eastward across the divide to where the stream jackknifed, [Scott] caught sight of its telltale marker—a two-pronged natural rock formation, eighty feet high, that to thirsty conquistadors had once resembled a pair of sherry casks”) are captivating. The novel’s major limitation is its adherence to stereotypical language: Although Conhaim displays substantial knowledge of the tribes he writes about and creates Native American characters who are as fully developed as his White players, the book’s narration, which is largely from the point of view of Scott and other White men, is full of references to “braves” and “squaws.” Many readers may find these descriptions off-putting.
An engrossing and well-written tale of the Old West.Pub Date: June 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9843175-2-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Broken Arrow Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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