A zesty, if flawed, historical adventure that’s worth a read to witness the love that the author lavishes on his characters...
In this first novel, Pollock takes his hero from humble beginnings in Colonial America at the end of the 18th century to the Sandwich Islands, where he becomes a warrior in the service of Kamehameha the Great, the founder of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
Zachary Bower is born in a cabin on the frontier of the British colonies, not long before the start of the Revolutionary War. After the death of his mother, he’s sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Connecticut. His uncle Israel is the captain of the Setauket, a far-ranging merchant ship. Soon, young Zachary ships off with Israel’s crew, learning the ropes while heading to Spanish California. On shore leave in San Diego, he gets left behind and impressed onto another ship that’s heading to the Sandwich Islands. Here, the real adventure begins—as if rounding Cape Horn weren’t hair-raising enough. Zachary’s new vessel, the Fair American, is captured by the island’s residents, and only he and the first mate survive. Soon, along with a seaman from their sister ship, they find themselves the captives of the great leader Kamehameha—a well-known historical figure. Zachary, however, is fictional, as is Kaleo, a young Hawaiian who becomes Zachary’s minder and mentor; the comely Pua Lani, who becomes Zachary’s common-law wife, is also a product of Pollock’s pen. As Kaleo and Zachary become close friends, the latter proves to be a fearsome warrior in Kamehameha’s campaign to unite the people of the archipelago. The descriptions of the fighting are unbelievably savage and bloody, but finally result in sufficient victories and a peaceful interlude. Zachary becomes a father, and he’s accepted among the members of his new society (they call him “Koa Kai,” or “Sea Warrior”), and he’s also found peace within himself. The story doesn’t end there, but suffice it to say that some readers will find the final resolution to be very satisfying, while others may feel that Pollock caved to the temptation of providing a happy ending. The author, in his bio, notes that he’s been “an avid sailor for over fifty years” and his details of a ship’s rigging and maneuvers, and of sailing a vessel through horrendous weather, have the air of verisimilitude. He also fruitfully contrasts Zachary’s straight-laced Christianity with the life of the islanders. For example, Pua, at Zachary’s suggestion, simply agrees to be monogamous and live with him, but Zachary sometimes finds himself struggling with Christian guilt. The sailing scenes are truly riveting throughout, and readers will get a real feeling for the island paradise, with its mix of the idyllic and the brutal. That said, despite the author’s clear investment in this historical material, the text often suffers from idiosyncratic punctuation, as well as erroneous word choices or misspellings, such as “lien-to” instead of “lean-to,” “shuttered” instead of “shuddered,” and “windless” instead of “windlass.”
A zesty, if flawed, historical adventure that’s worth a read to witness the love that the author lavishes on his characters and their adventures.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5934-0
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A curious fusion of the predictable and the unconventional which, given the appetite for Paris, love, and wartime tragedy,...
While a timid French music teacher grieves the death of her partner, outside, on the streets of Paris, his ghost lingers, lending historical context and soulful musings to a story of unresolved anguish and late love.
Chaudhry’s elegant debut rests on an unusual and risky premise: It is narrated in part by a soul in limbo. Julien Dalsace has died before the story opens, and his old-fashioned voice sets the scene: “The scent of lilacs on the breeze stirs dormant phantoms to life, but music is sorcery more potent.” We are in Paris in the year of the bicentennial, 1989, observing, like Julien, the struggles of his surviving partner, Sylvie, to cope with her loss. Julien, although spectral, is the novel’s lynchpin. The romance between him—an older, upper-class, married Jewish psychologist—and the quiveringly sensitive piano teacher is the beating heart of the story. But there’s another thread, taking the reader back to 1942, when the Jews of Paris were rounded up and deported, including Julien’s sister, Clara, and her twin daughters. Julien never forgave himself for his absence in London during World War II and his failure to save Clara, but a secret folder that emerges after his death offers Sylvie the opportunity to conclude his quest to discover the fate of Clara’s girls. Julien’s curious perspective—on history, on other ghosts, on the beauty but complexity of France generally and the Île Saint-Louis, his corner of Paris, in particular—is the novel’s most original aspect. Elsewhere, while Chaudhry brings a kind of reverent seriousness to events both past and present, her approach is more familiar. Characters are often simple, like the kindly Jewish baker, the protective (but kindly) concierge, the sympathetic American lodgers, and even Sylvie’s anthropomorphized terrier, Coco. And resolutions, even sad ones, arrive with coincidence and ease.
A curious fusion of the predictable and the unconventional which, given the appetite for Paris, love, and wartime tragedy, might well touch a popular nerve.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54460-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories...
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.
When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. “It was Sister St. Savior’s vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands.” By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mother—a neighbor with a houseful of babies—then they finagle a baby carriage, and “the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses.” This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what’s to come—for example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriages—this novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms.
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28014-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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