An unforgiving look at the battles between the white settlers of the mid-1800s and the Dakota, offering an illuminating...
A debut historical novel details the events that led to the Dakota War in the 19th-century Midwest.
Swanson begins his tale as a Native American surrenders his daughter to a white fur trader as bounty on a lost wager. About nine months later, the “half-breed” Annawon “Anton” McAllister is born to the forfeited daughter. Anton is raised by his mother, who teaches him many of her Algonquin ways, including hunting and tracking. His mother dies when he is still young, and he must make his own way. As he matures, he straddles the worlds of whites and Native Americans. He works for many years as chief hunter and scout for the Army, growing close with some of its members, visiting trading posts, and learning the ways of local fur traders. In Anton’s young adulthood, a friend named Tomawka, a Native American, is killed by a wolf. Anton feels responsible for the man’s wife, Star Woman, and the couple’s infant son. Quickly becoming attached to the widow and child, Anton resolves to settle with them and forge a new family. Meanwhile, tension builds between the Dakota (part of the Great Sioux Nation) and the American government. In his engaging story, Swanson shows the U.S. repeatedly failing to honor treaties it has with the Dakota. As the Dakota lose land and concomitant hunting rights, hunger ensues, followed by increased violence. The author graphically depicts the bloodshed and hostilities that result as the Dakota take their revenge on white settlers. This lengthy and well-researched tale is so specific that it often reads more like a historical account than a novel, providing comprehensive exposition on one topic after another. Chock full of details about the Midwestern territories, the different Native American tribes inhabiting the region, land disputes, cultural differences, and methods of fighting, the book delivers an engrossing education for readers seeking to learn about this period.
An unforgiving look at the battles between the white settlers of the mid-1800s and the Dakota, offering an illuminating perspective on Native American history.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9863267-1-4
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Rainy River Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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